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EARLY 90'S ONLINE: Memoria Agrippa
15 years ago
I just recently received an email from my old old Old old old friend Ray Ogar.
[Gather 'round little furlings, this goes back to the Beforetime]
I must've met Ray online in the early 90's. On my Mac SE/30 with my 1200 baud modem blaring away.
There was no internet as we know it, all there was was Mosaic and the World Wide Web consisted of just over 1000 websites, almost all of them pertaining to academia, or the goofy personal sites those same academics made on lunchbreak. Which meant nerd porn and lots of it.
All we had was USENET and we fuckin' loved it. (Or BBS's, whatever). We had 16 fuckin' colors, three pixels and the truth - or rather alt.truth.pixel.pixel.pixel.binaries.erotica - which meant setting your computer to overnight download a single picture broken into hundreds of smaller pieces like yiffytrap.jpg (001/342) to yiffytrap.jpg (342/342) and then realizing 8 hours later, around yiffytrap.jpg (217/342), that the vixen you were lusting after had a cock the size of Florida. No no, this was actually before even all that - I don't think Doug Winger was even doing his thing then.
Anyway, your Unca Esel had yet to discover he was furry. Furry didn't exist outside of zines at the time and certainly wasn't organized online into anything I would've stumbled over.
The only online subcultures available to me as a low-level nerd were MUDs, Kibo, Cyberpunk and Hardcore BDSM via #IRC (which I was involved in using the name 'deadhorse' - haha, so furry, so unknowingly so).
I didn't understand Kibology. I really gave that one a shot, I did. But nothing. I played MUDs, I learned to code, I levelled up. I was shocked SHOCKED upon discovering that the winsome elven lass I had been crushing hard over for months named "Aphrodite" was being controlled by a male player thousands of miles away. My whole world shifted instantly and the full promise of the Infobahn (as we called it, ok no not really) revealed itself to me.
YOU COULD PRETEND TO BE, like, ANYTHING ONLINE. oh my god. (We even had to spell out oh my god). Everything was text and yet infinitely richer and more "visually" vibrant than all the flashing banner ads in the world, because it happened in your brain. You rendered the images directly to the neurons.
To get to the point. I met rayOgar in the USENET group alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo which was an ongoing freeform rp thread of largely in-character interactions set within the bar featured in Neuromancer, and if you don't know what that is, it's past your bedtime. This was the kewlest thing in the wurld, you had the characters themselves, but then also the authors inserting themselves in-character to interact with each other as the story happened. was all very meta and powered by Your Imagination™. It was a persistent cyberpunk sci-fi setting in the form of serial instalments that everybody participated in. You had to type with words and paint pictures that way. It was Ar-Pee without emoticons. Hot damn! This was before Snow Crash so we didn't even have the term "avatar" yet to refer to the "character" that you used as your primary representation.
Unfortunately for me, this was also the twilight of this particular era, and I was arriving late to the party. I was, in the parlance, a "newbie". Which was what I called myself at first because I didn't know any better. I was [Newbie], which I always meant to be a placeholder until I could think of something better. When I realized what things actually meant, I flipped it to [Eibwen] which seemed vaguely Germanic but was oh-so-clever, etc.
Ray represented himself as :demogirl which, if you were cool at the time, was what you did, flipped genders, pretended to be what you weren't. Chaos! He was something of a late term regular, and was already entrenched in the storylines going on. I tried to join in but got nowhere. Nobody knew me, nobody cared. So I gave up on that and instead focused on simply writing creatively. Fiction, poems, my own small narratives. Other people were doing this too, in addition to the ongoing metastory of the people in the bar. I cast myself as someone who had biological augmentation to devolve into something more feral than human. To me, this was clearly the edgy way to go, see? And so while everybody else was slowly turning into cyborgs, I was turning into Yiffyaffy McFluffypants without knowing it. I was a 17 year old biology major after all :P I thought: no no.. wetware and mutation is gonna make me stand out among all this cyber robotica. So my character resembled some kind of generic furry beast. More furry than furry. None of us had the language for it though to even call it that.
Little by little, folks noticed my writing, and then me, :demo was first. This was how it worked: Online, you are what you do. It still works that way, but the notion of the online world as a meritocracy wasn't so obvious at the time. We interacted some back and forth. I added my two cents to the narrative in the form of sentient killfile bounty hunter who popped around rounding up spam (it was rare enough for each bit of spam to be recognizable and a unique bit of online popculture, re: MAKE MONEY FAST - Dave Rhodes) and filtering out crap so the bar could function. A bouncer so to speak. It was all very noir and cyberrrrrr :B It was popular and I drew eyeballs to my posts.
I wrote several short stories that I have buried somewhere, I think/hope. And a complete novel in this way, serially posting it to A.C.C. over a couple years, entitled Mr. Tap's Problem and began the sequel, Ever See A Dog Fuck A Toaster?. Both of which may or may not still exist online in some form. Mr.Tap's Problem (because it was created in instalments) may be hard to track down, if you can't find all the fragments. The only links Google finds don't even work anymore. And ESDFT only exists as an obscure acronym now. I didn't get too far into it before some comet came along and wiped out all the USENET dinosaurs. I don't know really. I think I graduated school, moved back to Alabama and lost internet connection for several Dark Ages, after which the world had Moved On and the chatsubo was an obsolete ghost town. Everybody grew up, and there wasn't anything like FA to preserve the events or maintain the critical mass needed.
The newsgroups dissolved, the World Wide Web won, the Internet bloomed into the fragrant rose we know so well today. But Ray and I stayed in touch. He made "electronic music" which consisted of giving blowjobs to his microphone, while sitting next to a television blaring white noise, something that is almost impossible to reproduce with current tv technology. Ray was devout however, and inspiring.
I made music too. I had the brilliant insight to run the cassette tape adapter (cutting edge tech) into the headphone jack of my Mac and have the cable hanging out of my twin deck boombox. And so I could record to audio tape whatever came out of my computer. I played with the bleeps and bloops, using pause and record, and samples I either had the patience to find and download as binary files, or that I got off of CD (this was sooooo scifi) by running another cable out of the carefully horizontally balanced spinning cd player into the mic jack of the computer. Cables everywhere! It was enough to make music with. I could even record shit off the radio onto tape, play the tape into the mac, fuck with it and then play it back from the mac back onto tape. Ray and I sent these tapes back and forth to each other. His were much more conceptual and concerned with ambiance and a kind of sonic expressionism. I was hopelessly mired in Baltimore hip-hop and so my stuff was much simpler and groove oriented, but we fed off each other creatively. Lots of positive "ooh listen to this" and "ooh what about this" and "cool, and now what about this?"
We used a lot of stamps and altered post cards. Handmade correspondence! The USPS was simply part of the network. Anyway, I went on into science and left my creativity to languish, while Ray stuck to his shit and it took him places. Our correspondences dwindled, but not the sense of kindred spirits. I wrote a lot of scifi fiction during this time. I think everybody did who was inolved. Ray had the sense to gather it all up and self-publish it as a document (not for sale, you just have to ask it's listed on his site in with the books). He hoarded information, archived it all. You have to understand, there was no Google, and the notion of archiving this stuff for later retrieval was not a part of it, we were just all making shit up as we went along. I don't even have my own copies of the tapes I made for him. I only have the copies he sent to me. Very raw goofy experimental shit. You can do so much with a tape recorder, that's for sure.
My personal detour into science set me back 10 years from Ray who was always a half-step ahead of me anyway. Ray is now teaching design in Texas, making music at a highly refined level, and still very keen, very sharp about what he does. We've never met, probably never will. Good times, good times. Like Gaugin and Van Gogh.
The whole thing involved maybe, at most, at most 50 people, and maybe another order of magnitude in lurkers who were just reading along. Lots of fearless DIY creativity going on and new modes and aesthetics being forged. People like Ray evolved into the Aphex Twins and Wachowski Brothers of the era, I was never that sharp to begin with and then veered off into unrelated academia instead, and now I draw funny animals and paint :)
[I'm going to end this part here, and just point to the music track here as a separate journal entry.]
[Also pointing to some keen digging by elix who found some archival stuff.]
[Gather 'round little furlings, this goes back to the Beforetime]
I must've met Ray online in the early 90's. On my Mac SE/30 with my 1200 baud modem blaring away.
There was no internet as we know it, all there was was Mosaic and the World Wide Web consisted of just over 1000 websites, almost all of them pertaining to academia, or the goofy personal sites those same academics made on lunchbreak. Which meant nerd porn and lots of it.
All we had was USENET and we fuckin' loved it. (Or BBS's, whatever). We had 16 fuckin' colors, three pixels and the truth - or rather alt.truth.pixel.pixel.pixel.binaries.erotica - which meant setting your computer to overnight download a single picture broken into hundreds of smaller pieces like yiffytrap.jpg (001/342) to yiffytrap.jpg (342/342) and then realizing 8 hours later, around yiffytrap.jpg (217/342), that the vixen you were lusting after had a cock the size of Florida. No no, this was actually before even all that - I don't think Doug Winger was even doing his thing then.
Anyway, your Unca Esel had yet to discover he was furry. Furry didn't exist outside of zines at the time and certainly wasn't organized online into anything I would've stumbled over.
The only online subcultures available to me as a low-level nerd were MUDs, Kibo, Cyberpunk and Hardcore BDSM via #IRC (which I was involved in using the name 'deadhorse' - haha, so furry, so unknowingly so).
I didn't understand Kibology. I really gave that one a shot, I did. But nothing. I played MUDs, I learned to code, I levelled up. I was shocked SHOCKED upon discovering that the winsome elven lass I had been crushing hard over for months named "Aphrodite" was being controlled by a male player thousands of miles away. My whole world shifted instantly and the full promise of the Infobahn (as we called it, ok no not really) revealed itself to me.
YOU COULD PRETEND TO BE, like, ANYTHING ONLINE. oh my god. (We even had to spell out oh my god). Everything was text and yet infinitely richer and more "visually" vibrant than all the flashing banner ads in the world, because it happened in your brain. You rendered the images directly to the neurons.
To get to the point. I met rayOgar in the USENET group alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo which was an ongoing freeform rp thread of largely in-character interactions set within the bar featured in Neuromancer, and if you don't know what that is, it's past your bedtime. This was the kewlest thing in the wurld, you had the characters themselves, but then also the authors inserting themselves in-character to interact with each other as the story happened. was all very meta and powered by Your Imagination™. It was a persistent cyberpunk sci-fi setting in the form of serial instalments that everybody participated in. You had to type with words and paint pictures that way. It was Ar-Pee without emoticons. Hot damn! This was before Snow Crash so we didn't even have the term "avatar" yet to refer to the "character" that you used as your primary representation.
Unfortunately for me, this was also the twilight of this particular era, and I was arriving late to the party. I was, in the parlance, a "newbie". Which was what I called myself at first because I didn't know any better. I was [Newbie], which I always meant to be a placeholder until I could think of something better. When I realized what things actually meant, I flipped it to [Eibwen] which seemed vaguely Germanic but was oh-so-clever, etc.
Ray represented himself as :demogirl which, if you were cool at the time, was what you did, flipped genders, pretended to be what you weren't. Chaos! He was something of a late term regular, and was already entrenched in the storylines going on. I tried to join in but got nowhere. Nobody knew me, nobody cared. So I gave up on that and instead focused on simply writing creatively. Fiction, poems, my own small narratives. Other people were doing this too, in addition to the ongoing metastory of the people in the bar. I cast myself as someone who had biological augmentation to devolve into something more feral than human. To me, this was clearly the edgy way to go, see? And so while everybody else was slowly turning into cyborgs, I was turning into Yiffyaffy McFluffypants without knowing it. I was a 17 year old biology major after all :P I thought: no no.. wetware and mutation is gonna make me stand out among all this cyber robotica. So my character resembled some kind of generic furry beast. More furry than furry. None of us had the language for it though to even call it that.
Little by little, folks noticed my writing, and then me, :demo was first. This was how it worked: Online, you are what you do. It still works that way, but the notion of the online world as a meritocracy wasn't so obvious at the time. We interacted some back and forth. I added my two cents to the narrative in the form of sentient killfile bounty hunter who popped around rounding up spam (it was rare enough for each bit of spam to be recognizable and a unique bit of online popculture, re: MAKE MONEY FAST - Dave Rhodes) and filtering out crap so the bar could function. A bouncer so to speak. It was all very noir and cyberrrrrr :B It was popular and I drew eyeballs to my posts.
I wrote several short stories that I have buried somewhere, I think/hope. And a complete novel in this way, serially posting it to A.C.C. over a couple years, entitled Mr. Tap's Problem and began the sequel, Ever See A Dog Fuck A Toaster?. Both of which may or may not still exist online in some form. Mr.Tap's Problem (because it was created in instalments) may be hard to track down, if you can't find all the fragments. The only links Google finds don't even work anymore. And ESDFT only exists as an obscure acronym now. I didn't get too far into it before some comet came along and wiped out all the USENET dinosaurs. I don't know really. I think I graduated school, moved back to Alabama and lost internet connection for several Dark Ages, after which the world had Moved On and the chatsubo was an obsolete ghost town. Everybody grew up, and there wasn't anything like FA to preserve the events or maintain the critical mass needed.
The newsgroups dissolved, the World Wide Web won, the Internet bloomed into the fragrant rose we know so well today. But Ray and I stayed in touch. He made "electronic music" which consisted of giving blowjobs to his microphone, while sitting next to a television blaring white noise, something that is almost impossible to reproduce with current tv technology. Ray was devout however, and inspiring.
I made music too. I had the brilliant insight to run the cassette tape adapter (cutting edge tech) into the headphone jack of my Mac and have the cable hanging out of my twin deck boombox. And so I could record to audio tape whatever came out of my computer. I played with the bleeps and bloops, using pause and record, and samples I either had the patience to find and download as binary files, or that I got off of CD (this was sooooo scifi) by running another cable out of the carefully horizontally balanced spinning cd player into the mic jack of the computer. Cables everywhere! It was enough to make music with. I could even record shit off the radio onto tape, play the tape into the mac, fuck with it and then play it back from the mac back onto tape. Ray and I sent these tapes back and forth to each other. His were much more conceptual and concerned with ambiance and a kind of sonic expressionism. I was hopelessly mired in Baltimore hip-hop and so my stuff was much simpler and groove oriented, but we fed off each other creatively. Lots of positive "ooh listen to this" and "ooh what about this" and "cool, and now what about this?"
We used a lot of stamps and altered post cards. Handmade correspondence! The USPS was simply part of the network. Anyway, I went on into science and left my creativity to languish, while Ray stuck to his shit and it took him places. Our correspondences dwindled, but not the sense of kindred spirits. I wrote a lot of scifi fiction during this time. I think everybody did who was inolved. Ray had the sense to gather it all up and self-publish it as a document (not for sale, you just have to ask it's listed on his site in with the books). He hoarded information, archived it all. You have to understand, there was no Google, and the notion of archiving this stuff for later retrieval was not a part of it, we were just all making shit up as we went along. I don't even have my own copies of the tapes I made for him. I only have the copies he sent to me. Very raw goofy experimental shit. You can do so much with a tape recorder, that's for sure.
My personal detour into science set me back 10 years from Ray who was always a half-step ahead of me anyway. Ray is now teaching design in Texas, making music at a highly refined level, and still very keen, very sharp about what he does. We've never met, probably never will. Good times, good times. Like Gaugin and Van Gogh.
The whole thing involved maybe, at most, at most 50 people, and maybe another order of magnitude in lurkers who were just reading along. Lots of fearless DIY creativity going on and new modes and aesthetics being forged. People like Ray evolved into the Aphex Twins and Wachowski Brothers of the era, I was never that sharp to begin with and then veered off into unrelated academia instead, and now I draw funny animals and paint :)
[I'm going to end this part here, and just point to the music track here as a separate journal entry.]
[Also pointing to some keen digging by elix who found some archival stuff.]
I came in at the very tail end of the BBS era, and far enough in the sticks (compared to a major urban city), so Usenet was, largely, a historical footnote for me (being that by the time I found it, the Eternal September was already well under way) and IRC was quickly becoming the next target for an object example of the tragedy of the commons.
Always good to reconnect with the past every so often.
I can't even look at it directly. Like looking at your first ugly attempts to create life from the slab.
A few years back I was going through my old high school shit and stumbled upon a print-out of a short story that looked familiar. I read the first page and felt absolutely disgusted. Narrative was full of cliches, typos that even a half-retarded spellchecker working off a Catalan dictionary would find, and tense shifts within the same sentence. I was about to rip the sheet in half, not knowing why I'd kept such horrible tripe, and then the top of the page caught my eye as I spotted my own name. It was the very first short story I wrote, a piece that spawned over fifty pages of fantasy and my first world-building experience.
My English teacher wasn't blind, either. I got a 100% mark, because the mechanical flaws paled in comparison to the massive potential she saw.
Elix just found an archive of an archive of http://www.joel-benford.co.uk/teabowl/" rel="nofollow ugc noreferrer noopener">stuff from A.C.C.
Looking through it, one thing I see posted is William Gibson's proposed Alien 3 script. I remember when that emerged, we were all freaking out over it.
My website was called The Kitchen, then. Omg I was 'edgy' lol. RAWR FEEL MY EDGY FLEX.
If you can tweet from a Commodore 64, I'm sure it's possible to use virtualization software to replicate a VAX or *NIX box and rate-limit it to speeds slow enough to be measured in baud.
Your story is very Mondo 2000. Did you have smart drugs and wish you could go to Burning Man or to a EBN or Survival Research Laboratories show? :3
Man we were all so jazzed for the gibsonian cyberpunk future, which was actually taking place in around 1990-95, it feels like shoulder-wings and Rosie the Robot Maid now.
I have archived portions of alt.fan.dragons, and I recall making and reading a few dozen entertaining posts to some poli-sci and lucid-dreamers groups. I remember Math Genesis and Countable Hotel from a math group (which I can only find second-gen versions of nowadays). I remember reading a story about a plague of people turning into appliances and cinder blocks on one of those newsgroups. Fun stuff, man.
In 1991, when I got my first systems admin job as a student, I became the guy that ran the news server on campus. C-News, we used (as opposed to INN, which was a superior product at the time). So I had all the power. I could determine which groups we subscribed to, and which we filtered out. And since we only had a few hundred megabytes to play with (which was a LOT back then), I had to balance article expiration times against group counts and volume. And god forbid the news server would fill up. And double forbid if the history file got corrupted and had to be rebuilt from scratch, which sometimes took a few days. These were my earliest internet geek days, when I first learned how to forge a request to create a new newsgroup .. and thence, how to detect forged requests. A valuable skill for the few years or so before Gopher, Mosaic/Netscape, and Yahoo! Search took over the web (back when it was less of a search engine and more like giant pages of bookmarks).
Do you remember playing Omega over a 1200-baud modem? When it actually took a few seconds to display the screen every time you moved? Ah, text scrollers. How so not modem-ready you were.
Man. Where did the last 20 years go. These memories don't SEEM that old to me. O.o
I remember "The Kitchen!"
How about eGroups? They became Yahoo groups. The last one I was involved with finally shut its electronic doors this month. I'd been with them over ten years. Seems things like FaceBook made them obsolete.
All my stuff was written out by hand then, so I still have notebooks and such filled with the originals. It's the digital stuff I now make that only exists digitally and could, I suppose be lost.
And of course, I met Tyler in the Purple Nurple, had never considered Michigan as even a real place and never thought of leaving Boston. Look where that all went!
*HUG* Cool stuff, you. Glad to know you.