MindVox
Encyclopedia
| MindVox |
|---|
 |
| Created by |
| Bruce Fancher Bruce Fancher Bruce Fancher is a computer hacker, a former member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group. He co-founded MindVox in 1991 with Patrick K. Kroupa.-Early years:Bruce Fancher grew up in New York City... & Patrick K. Kroupa Patrick K. Kroupa Patrick Karel Kroupa is an American writer, hacker and activist. Kroupa was a member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher... |
| Services |
| Community/Social Networking |
| (ISP Internet service provider An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers... defunct as of 1997) |
| Founded in: 1991 |
| Location |
| New York City, New York, USA |
MindVox was a famed early Internet Service Provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. A controversial sometime media darling — the service was referred to as "the Hells Angels
Hells Angels
The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club is a worldwide one-percenter motorcycle gang and organized crime syndicate whose members typically ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles. In the United States and Canada, the Hells Angels are incorporated as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation. Their primary motto...
of Cyberspace" — it was founded in 1991 by Bruce Fancher
Bruce Fancher
Bruce Fancher is a computer hacker, a former member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group. He co-founded MindVox in 1991 with Patrick K. Kroupa.-Early years:Bruce Fancher grew up in New York City...
(Dead Lord) and Patrick Kroupa (Lord Digital), two former members of the legendary Legion of Doom
Legion of Doom (hacking)
The Legion of Doom was a hacker group active from the 1980s to the late 1990s and early 2000. Their name appears to be a reference to the antagonists of Challenge of the Superfriends...
hacker group. The system was at least partially online by March 1992, and open to the public in November of that year.
MindVox was the second ISP in New York City. Some controversy over this latter statement exists; however, by the time the first MindVox test message was posted to Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
in 1992, customers of the rival service, Panix
Panix (ISP)
Panix is the third-oldest ISP in the world after NetCom and the World. Originally running on A/UX on an Apple Macintosh IIfx, Panix has gone through a number of transitions as the Internet has grown. It maintains a vibrant community of shell users and posters to its private panix.* USENET newsgroups...
, had made nearly 6,000 posts. The test message was apparently posted by the infamous Phiber Optik, who would have been waiting for a Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
grand jury
Grand jury
A grand jury is a type of jury that determines whether a criminal indictment will issue. Currently, only the United States retains grand juries, although some other common law jurisdictions formerly employed them, and most other jurisdictions employ some other type of preliminary hearing...
indictment
Indictment
An indictment , in the common-law legal system, is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that maintain the concept of felonies, the serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that lack the concept of felonies often use that of an indictable offence—an...
at the time for hacking activities.
Another potential "start date" for the service would be the registration of the service's phantom.com domain, on 14 February 1992.
Founding and Early Years
|
The distinctive logo shown to the right was the system's original ASCII art
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
banner, appearing on the text-only service's dial-up
Dial-up access
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network to establish a dialled connection to an Internet service provider via telephone lines...
login page. MindVox was originally accessible only through telnet
TELNET
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...
, ftp and direct dial-up. Its existence predates the invention of SSH
Secure Shell
Secure Shell is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers that it connects via a secure channel over an insecure network: a server and a client...
and widespread use of the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
by several years. In later years, MindVox was also accessible via the web.
The parent company, Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. took its name from a hacking program written by Kroupa during his early teens, called Phantom Access
Phantom Access
Phantom Access was the name given to a series of hacking programs written by Patrick Kroupa of LOD. The programs were worked on during the early to mid 80s , and designed to run on the Apple II computer and Apple-Cat modem....
.
MindVox functioned both as a private BBS
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
service, containing its own dedicated discussion groups, termed "conferences" — though usually referred to as "forums" by users — as well as a provider of internet and Usenet access. By 1994 the subscriber base was at around 3,000. In many ways MindVox was a harder, edgier, New York incarnation of the WELL, (a famous Northern California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
n online community.) While users were drawn from all over the world, the majority lived in the New York City area, and members who met through the conferences often became acquainted in person, either on their own, or through what were termed "VoxMeats" (a formal gathering of members whose double entendre
Double entendre
A double entendre or adianoeta is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase is devised to be understood in either of two ways. Often the first meaning is straightforward, while the second meaning is less so: often risqué or ironic....
name was rumored to be well-earned.)
Prominent MindVox "evangelists" included sci-fi author Charles Platt
Charles Platt (science-fiction author)
Charles Platt is an author, journalist and computer programmer. He relocated from England to the United States in 1970, is a naturalized U.S. citizen and has one daughter, Rose Fox...
, who wrote about MindVox for Wired Magazine and featured it within his book Anarchy Online. MindVox also attracted (sometimes with the aid of free accounts) artists, writers, activists and luminaries such as Billy Idol
Billy Idol
William Michael Albert Broad , better known by his stage name Billy Idol, is an English rock musician. A member of the Bromley Contingent of Sex Pistols fans, Idol first achieved fame in the punk rock era as a member of the band Generation X...
, Wil Wheaton
Wil Wheaton
Richard William "Wil" Wheaton III is an American actor and writer. As an actor, he is best known for his portrayals of Wesley Crusher on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gordie Lachance in the film Stand by Me and Joey Trotta in Toy Soldiers...
, Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
, Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media...
, John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow is an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic...
, and Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...
. The level of hysteria and hype surrounding MindVox was so great that in 1993 executives at MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
who were using the system wanted to buy it outright and turn MindVox into a subsidiary of Viacom
Viacom
Viacom Inc. , short for "Video & Audio Communications", is an American media conglomerate with interests primarily in, but not limited to, cinema and cable television...
.
"Voices in My Head"
MindVox was deeply connected to the emerging non-academic hacker culture and ideas about the potentials of cyberspaceCyberspace
Cyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...
, as can be seen in Patrick Kroupa's essay, Voices in my Head, MindVox: The Overture, which announced the upcoming opening of MindVox, and crossed the line into shaping an entire culture's mythology, seeing publication in magazines such as Wired, and extensive coverage throughout the media. Voices provided a compelling and sweeping first-person overview of the cultural forces that were at play in the hacker underground during the decade that pre-dated MindVox, considered by some the "Golden Age
Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...
" of cyberspace.
More than a decade later, Voices remains one of the most read and widely-distributed pieces of writing to ever emerge about the origins and possible futures of cyberspace. It was the spark that propelled Kroupa out of obscurity,,,, and into the pages of books describing him as the Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison
James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...
of cyberspace. Voices also helped turn MindVox from being just another ISP into a counter-cultural media darling meriting full-length features in magazines and newspapers such as Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...
, The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
and The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
.
"Voice: Waffle ][+ the NeXTSTEP"
As with many things MindVox-related, the name of the software MindVox ran on, was both a play on words and an elaborate inside-joke. Voice: Waffle ][+ the NeXTSTEP (usually referred to simply as Voice, although it frequently was referred to by the plural Voices as well), was the name given to MindVox's conferencing system. WaffleWaffle (bbs)
Waffle is a bulletin-board system created by Tom Dell which ran under DOS and later UNIX. The software was unique in many ways, including the fact that all of the configuration files were in readable text files, and that it fully supported UUCP on the DOS platform.A Usenet news group named...
refers to the original software that MindVox was based on, the ][+ pays homage to Kroupa and Fancher's hacker past and the use of Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
computers; NeXTSTEP
NEXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP was the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers, such as the NeXTcube...
was a reference to the NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
platform and operating system, with which MindVox was developed and launched.
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
and meet a cryptic shell prompt
Command Prompt
Command Prompt is the Microsoft-supplied command-line interpreter on OS/2, Windows CE and on Windows NT-based operating systems...
, the entire system was accessible through Fancher's highly-flexible interface.
The original Waffle software was written by Tom Dell, who was apparently part of MindVox from its inception. To this date there are Easter-eggs and cross-references on both MindVox and the system that Tom Dell became better known for in the late 90's and beyond: Rotten.com
Rotten.com
Rotten.com is a United States-hosted shock site with the slogan "An archive of disturbing illustration" it is operated by Soylent Communications....
. Going to Rotten's search page, and triple-clicking on the whitespace located between the Contact section and the gray bar at the bottom, reveals an inscrutable ibogaine rant.
By the mid-90's the original Waffle software was nearly unrecognizable; Fancher had converted Voice to a client-server architecture, included a web interface, and added elaborate "power user" features which seem to have been added to address the evolving needs of the community; or due to a strange combination of drugs, nostalgia and pure whim. An example of the latter case is VoxChat, a proprietary chat system written for MindVox by employee David Schenfeld, which spun off into the commercial product ENTchat after MindVox shut down. Diversi-Dial
Diversi-Dial
Diversi-Dial, or DDial was an online chat server that was popular during the mid-1980s. It was a specialized type of bulletin board system that allowed all callers to send lines of text to each other in real-time, operating at 300 baud...
, and the Diversi-Dial spinoff ENTchat, allowed MindVox to connect via the Diversi-Dial chat protocol.), or in Kroupa's own words:
- As of this writing there are roughly a dozen remaining DDIAL's running on Apple computers, Novation has long since gone Chapter 11, Bill Basham (the author of DDIAL) has gone back to being a full-time doctor, and one slightly disturbed person in the Phantom Access Group has written the world's only version of DDIAL that will run on Unix based machines and allow T1 connected, distributed sites with gigabytes of disk and thousands of users, to hook into Pig's Knuckle Idaho's very own 7 line DDIAL running at a blazing fast 300 baud. Why this was done is a question best left to mental health professionals.
The last sentence in the paragraph quoted above could be applied to many features present in the MindVox shell,. It included advanced conferencing features interspersed with time-consuming, elaborate in-jokes with no commercial purpose whatsoever.
|
- The Fling Screen from MindVox. When inappropriate or extremely off-topic material was posted to a conference; moderators were unable to remove or destroy the message entirely, but they could move the message to the r0mPEr-RuM, a conference that was the collective garbage-dump of MindVox.
To this day the phantom.com MindVox archive continues its relationship with NeXT/NeXTSTEP, now in the form of Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
. Instead of using php
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
, perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
or Active Server Pages
Active Server Pages
Active Server Pages , also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated Web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic...
, the entire site runs Apple's WebObjects
WebObjects
WebObjects was a Java web application server from Apple Inc., and a web application framework that ran on the server. It was available at no additional cost. Its hallmark features were its object-orientation, database connectivity, and prototyping tools...
.
MindVox was a fusion of many strange parts, pieces and times. While Kroupa might be said to have provided the imaginative backstory of the "thoughtscape", Fancher was largely responsible for the software that made it all work. The synergy of Kroupa, Fancher and the user-base MindVox attracted was a major aspect of MindVox's rise to fame.
The MindVox shutdown
MindVox began to fall apart around 1996, when it ceased operating as an ISP, and shut off dial-up access. While the exact date of the shutdown is disputed, the New York Times lists the closure as occurring in July of that year. Ironically this happened a few months after New York Magazine voted MindVox as one of the three best ISP's in New York.A public message noted that free telnet access to the MindVox servers would still be available after the shutdown, but this did not last. While users were given the option to transfer their accounts to Interport Communications, the unique MindVox community did not survive.
Many different reasons have been given for the downfall, including increased competition from the arrival of large-scale providers like AT&T, possible legal difficulties, and the apparent incestuousness of the company and its core users. But none of the theories provided realistic answers as to why the final days of MindVox seem to be closer to The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
, and Altered States
Altered States
Altered States is a 1980 American science fiction-horror film adaptation of a novel by the same name by playwright and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. It was the only novel that Chayefsky ever wrote, as well as his final film. Both the novel and the film are based on John C...
, than a successful or unsuccessful technology corporation. Much of the legal paperwork from the time reads like something out of The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. The story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City and centers on four main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, British expatriate...
.
A 1999 article by Tom Higgins (username "Tomwhore" on the system), a user and one time employee of MindVox, summarized the turbulent closing thus:
- So what happened to MindVox? In short its customers happened. Under the strain of pleasing a paying customer base, watching a hobby turn into an industry and simply getting caught up in its own hype, MindVox tumbled into a soap opera nose dive of sex, drugs and mismanagement.
By 1997 Patrick Kroupa had effectively disappeared from public view. The last days of MindVox are more the stuff of mythology than recorded fact, with different publications listing different dates for the shutdown. The New York Times and Wired were apparently unable to arrive at a consensus, with the Times listing the sale of MindVox's client-base and the closing of the system, in 1996, while Wired was still covering an apparently open and at least partially operational MindVox circa 1997.
Additional material suggests MindVox was never fully "closed" but simply closed to the public to become a private, invitation-only system. Rumors of a private, "inside" MindVox circulated, fueled by reprints of supposed internal MindVox messages from 1998 and 1999 that circulated on various mailing lists. The mindvox.com domain remained registered while, for a time, mail to phantom.com was redirected to Interport. The major discrepancy between the Times and Wired dates lends additional credence to the idea that MindVox continued, at least for a while, to support a community after its modem lines were turned off.
MindVox in the 21st Century
Textfiles.com
textfiles.com is a web site run by Jason Scott dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the BBS world and various subcultures. The site categorises and stores thousands of ASCII files. It focuses on text files from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and...
. By 2001, Kroupa was back in the public eye and openly acknowledged being a lifelong heroin addict
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...
, who had finally kicked heroin and cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...
through the use of the hallucinogenic drug
Psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants
This general group of pharmacological agents can be divided into three broad categories: psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants. These classes of psychoactive drugs have in common that they can cause subjective changes in perception, thought, emotion and consciousness...
ibogaine
Ibogaine
Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in a number of plants, principally in a member of the Apocynaceae family known as Iboga . A hallucinogen with both psychedelic and dissociative properties, the substance is banned in some countries; in other countries it is being used...
.
It is unclear whether mailing lists on MindVox continued in perpetuity from the 90s, or began reappearing in 2000, but in addition to the Vox list it was hosting, by 2001 MindVox was a hub of activity in the fields of harm reduction
Harm reduction
Harm reduction refers to a range of public health policies designed to reduce the harmful consequences associated with recreational drug use and other high risk activities...
, drug policy reform
Drug policy reform
Drug policy reform, also known as drug law reform, is a term used to describe proposed changes to the way most governments respond to the socio-cultural influence on perception of psychoactive substance use...
, and psychedelic drug
Psychedelic drug
A psychedelic substance is a psychoactive drug whose primary action is to alter cognition and perception. Psychedelics are part of a wider class of psychoactive drugs known as hallucinogens, a class that also includes related substances such as dissociatives and deliriants...
s (most notably Ibogaine
Ibogaine
Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in a number of plants, principally in a member of the Apocynaceae family known as Iboga . A hallucinogen with both psychedelic and dissociative properties, the substance is banned in some countries; in other countries it is being used...
).
While the drug-related community surrounding MindVox : Ibogaine has taken on a completely new life; the interactive system itself, and the internal conferences and other services MindVox provided, have not returned (despite announcements and plans heralding the perpetually-delayed rebirth of MindVox).
In 2005, MindVox was featured in two documentary films. Bruce Fancher is interviewed in BBS: The Documentary
BBS: The Documentary
BBS: The Documentary is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system filmed by computer historian Jason Scott Sadofsky of textfiles.com....
, and Patrick Kroupa plays himself in Ibogaine: Rite of Passage,.
On December 9, 2005, the Transcriptions Project, placed The Agrippa Files
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Agrippa is a work of art created by speculative fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh. Gibson's text focused on the...
online, which included Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's, "Hacking 'Agrippa': The Source of the Online Text," an excerpt from his book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. The "Agrippa" discussed by Kirschenbaum was an unusual cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
-influenced media project from 1992 by the science-fiction author William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
; its first public "leak" was to MindVox users in December of that year.
Within the chapter, Kirschenbaum references several personal letters to Patrick Kroupa, circa 2003, and reveals that Kroupa cooperated with him by placing all of MindVox back online "for an hour or 5" so that Kirschenbaum could view the context within which Agrippa was originally released. In discussing the service, Kirschenbaum referred to MindVox as "a kind of interface between what Alan Sondheim
Alan Sondheim
Alan Sondheim is an American poet, critic, musician, artist, and theorist of cyberspace.-Biography:Alan Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from Brown University...
has aptly called the darknet and the clean, well lighted cyberspaces".
MindVox Reloaded
In January 2009 the mindvox.com website changed for the first time in over 8 years and featured a new third generation MindVox logo along with the caption Hell Frozen Over and a counter ticking down to April Fools' DayApril Fools' Day
April Fools' Day is celebrated in different countries around the world on April 1 every year. Sometimes referred to as All Fools' Day, April 1 is not a national holiday, but is widely recognized and celebrated as a day when many people play all kinds of jokes and foolishness...
.
On April 1, 2009, MindVox appears to have relaunched for the first time in the 21st century.
External links
While the labyrinth of conferences, files and user interactions providing a unique overview of the birth of the public internet that are buried within the depths of MindVox have never re-surfaced or been made publicly available, limited archives of some parts of the service remain online at:
- http://www.phantom.com/
- http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/
An IRC channel, EFnet
EFnet
EFnet or Eris Free network is a major IRC network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.- History :...
#mindvox, created in the 1990s, has survived as a gathering place for some members of the older community.