Net.Weirdness: Nice List and Weird Religions

 Let's get nice and weird! (Or at least, let's branch out and learn about something new.)

Nice Mailing List
Frendli-l
Mailing List
"Shiny happy people who don't know the meaning of the word 'flame.' A nice respite from the usual harsh stuff."
Still online? No, and it looks like it's a list that's down the electronic memoryhole, as I can't find any record of it now.

Weirdo Religions

Cousins (Wiccan Stuff)
FTP
"Keep up on the latest in Wicca. The Goddess orders you to subscribe!"
Still online? No, but 9 of (at least) 13 issues are archived here. (I'm miffed because while etext.org moved from an FTP to a website, it looks like the zine collection wasn't as complete as what was on the older FTP).

GASSHO: International Buddhist Electronic Journal
FTP
"Okay, a religion practiced by millions of people all over the world doesn't really qualify as 'weirdo,' but to most Westerners it's still a mystery. Learn something—read this journal."
Still online? Not via FTP, but DharmaNet is archived, which in turn archived four issues of Gassho, which was mentioned in a charmingly dated World-Wide Virtual Library page for Buddhist studies.
Still remembered? Yes, that, too, at the end of a really interesting article from Wired, published in 1994 and now online. The links are dead ends, and I doubt the old BBS numbers are still viable. But in more recent news, the world's largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist literature is available on the Internet Archive.

The Electric Mystic's Guide to the Internet
FTP
"The guide to religion on the Net."
Still online? No, but still remembered in this 1993 article on internet resources for religious studies, and in this digitized copy of Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, which notes that the site was home to Bulletin of the General Theological Library. I don't find anything contemporary for that Bulletin, but I found Theology on the Web's archive of theological journals (though they're all about Christian studies, so it seems).

URANTIAL: The Urantia Book
Mailing List
"This religion revolves around bare-chested men wearing Egyptian headgear, a perpetually smiling blond matron prophet, aliens, and channeling dead spirits. Sure to teeter your world view just a little."
Still online? No longer limited to a mailing list, there's a website for the Urantia Book, which is online in full.

Pagans
Mailing list and FTP
"Pat Robertson's worst nightmare. The latest news and info from the Neo-Pagan community."
Still online? Not via that list and FTP, but possibly the origins of that community are discussed in this article on how paganism found a home on the net, and there's Green Egg Magazine, the online presence of the journal of the Church of All Worlds that started in the 1960s. Bonus: another interesting article from 1995, titled "Queer Spaces, Modem Boys, and Pagan Statues: Gay/Lesbian Identity and the Construction of Cyberspace."

Crowley
FTP
"Aleister Crowley—that nasty devil-worshippin' dandy—sure cranked out the text."
Still online? No, but the words of "the Beast" have found many homes online, including the Hermetic Library, and the Internet Archive.

The Necronomicon
FTP
"Isn't this the thing that caused Bruce Campbell so much grief in that cheesy horror flick Army of Darkness? Well, whatever you do, don't read this ancient evil text out loud after you've downloaded it, or else you'll summon monsters that'll destroy the universe."
Still online? Yes! Well, something is available there, but it doesn't look like it'll bring forth deadites. (And Ash was just one of the more recent to refer to H. P. Lovecraft's fictional book.)

Net.Weirdness: Music to my gears, er pipes ..?

We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of the dreams.

IUMA, 1996

Chaos Control: Electronic Music E-zine
"Really cool e-zine about the latest in electronic music (industrial, techno, ambient). Runs the gamut."
FTP
Still online? No longer a Well-hosted FTP resource, the Chaos Control Digizine lives on!

Delta Snake Blues News
"Down and dirty, lost and lonely. Blue news you can use."
Still online? No, but here's an archive from two decades ago.
Still remembered? Yes, helpfully included in this [dated] list of Blues Links.

Girl Band Guide
E-mail
"Grrrrrllll bands galore. The latest scoop on your fave female bands."
Still online? No, the email address is lost to time, beyond the handbook. Fortunately, the internet is a pretty big place. And depending on what type or style of girl/ grrl band you want to know about, there's probably a website or forum for them. Wikipedia has a few starting points, on girl groups and riot grrls, for starters. And another snapshot in time, Billboard's 20 All-Female Bands You Need To Know from 2015.

HardC.O.R.E. Rap/Hip-Hop List
Mailing List
"Down with dwarner at the HardC.O.R.E hip hop list. Send a message and ask to subscribe."
Still online? No, but ...
Still remembered? Yes, in A blast from the past: HardC.O.R.E. 1994, a Google Groups mirror or archive of a lengthy post in 1998.

Punk-rock!
Mailing List
"Arrghhhhh! Punk's Not Dead! (it's only an animated corpse). Anyway, angst and anger are still spoken here and you can be sure that this list isn't gonna be coopted by the media, you arsehole!"
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes, briefly on this messy GEN Wiki page, which notes that there were "crosspostings from there on anarchy-list." It's also mentioned a few times in Maximum Rocknroll No. 140 from 1995. Update: MRR ceased its print publications in 2019, but lives on as a web-only publication, now explicitly fighting white supremacy in punk, because it's 2020 and this is the present fight we face.

Internet Underground Music Archive
Web
"A new darling of the media and a really cool way to wow your unwired friends, the Internet Underground Music Archive features audio clips bios, and pictures from about a zillion underground bands. Keep close to the edge."
Still online? Not the way it used to be, but thanks to a few partnered archiving efforts, IUMA is back online.

Net.Weirdness: MOOs and MUDs and MUSH, oh my!

"MOOs and MUDs bill themselves as 'text based virtual realities.' Whatever they are, they're great places to kill time."

Cleaned up cover of the book by Andrew Busey

First, some definitions: MUD: Multi-User Dungeon; MOO: MUD, object-oriented; MUSH: Muti-User Shared Hallucination, though the H is also spelled out as Hack, Habitat, and Holodeck. They started as text-based only, then things advanced and it got graphical.

LambdaMoo
Still online? No, this former Xerox-hosted service isn't still available to telnet into.
Still remembered? Yes, in the Virtual Community Center!

MediaMoo
Still online? No, don't try telnetting into MIT's service.
Still remembered? Yes! MIT still hosts this article from 1995!

TrippyMUSH
Still online? No, another dead end.
Still remembered? Yes, we're 3 for 3! High Weirdness by E-Mail circa 1995 is archived, with a couple other links

MUD/MOO/MUSH lists and links
Still online? It's dead and gone.
Still remembered? Maybe? This list of links, last updated May 1, 1998, includes an even then-dead Actlab UTexas link. But good news! 9 of the 11 links STILL WORK! MUD isn't dead!

Net.Weirdness: IRC, Life Assistance, and Mind Expansion

Log on, check in, and drop out. In other words, it's Internet Relay Chat, a question-and-answer email service, and mind-bending ... stuff!

Source: WikiHow -- How to Chat Online

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

"You wanna chat: you yearn to chat. If strangers keep turning down your talk requests, maybe what you need is a ride on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat). But what if your stiff-o weenie systems
administrator doesn't have an IRC client installed? Bummer. Here's some public clients you can telnet to..."
Telnet
Those servers may not still be online, but there are some browser-based IRC clients (Duck Duck Go search), if you want to see what's the fuss. Also, there are thousands of users on hundreds of servers to this day. IRC ain't dead!


Life Assistance

The Oracle
E-mail
"All of your questions answered—for a price. In return for your problems being solved, you must answer someone else's question in return. If you don't return the favor, you'll still probably get your answer, but you'll be plagued by horrible facial boils and hourly hard drive crashes until you submit."
Still online? YES! YES IT IS! Well, you can't email that old address, but The (Internet, or Usenet) Oracle lives on! If you aren't sure about groveling before The Oracle in hopes of an answer to your question, you can browse past digests.


Mind Expansion

Psychology software
FTP
"Mucho software written by real doctors with real scientific applications. A good place to start looking for software to mess with your wetware."
Still online? Nope.
Still remembered? Yes, and then some! Check out this list of 68 [dated] resources and [dead] links to Psychology Software Sites! I'll dig into those links later, and see if I can actually dig up some retro psych software.

MindVirus
Email and FTP
"An INCREDIBLE multimedia extravaganza. Part toy, part interactive movie, part game, part digital brain wrecker. MindVirus is well worth the time to track down and download."
Still online? No, and it looks like it's faded from the internet! It might have become Mindflux, "Australia's premiere virtual-reality distributor," or maybe something by the same folks. Or maybe there's just some key word overlap.

FNORD-L
Mailing list
"They might not tell you what fnord means, but if you have to ask, you don't belong here. Warped discussions by equally warped minds."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Somewhat, in this summary of the listserv. It's a pretty short summary, though.

Homebrewing List
Mailing list and FTP
"Sometimes mind expansion and smart drugs need to be tempered by some good or fashioned dumb drugs, like beer. Do it yourself!"
Still online? No, but yes. The FTP is no more, but the Home Brew Digest lives on as a website, which has an extensive archive, and you can still sign up for daily emails.

Weirdness
FTP
"Strange and wonderful stuff on everything from the Net to DMT elves, Extropians to quantum physics."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Sort of, in this [old] list of FTPs, and here in an archive of The High Weirdness.

Net.Weirdness: Groovy Graphics, Hacking and Phreaking

This really is a smorgasbord of weird links. This time, we'll check out groovy graphics, and more hacking and phreaking-focused links.

Groovy Graphics, Man

AcidWarp Trippy Screen Display
FTP: ftp.rahul.net (still online and open to the public!)
Directory: (Not there, sorry)
"Whoaaaaahhhhhhh Dude! It's like being blotto on blotter without the two-day hangover. Played on thousands of screens in thousands of dorm rooms while thousands of minds turn to Jell-O™."
Archived? Better than that, upgraded! As captured and documented by Eyecandy Archive (tagline: "Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp"), which also links to a half-hour HD (1920x1080) YouTube video:

Fractal Picture Archive
FTP
"Mandelbrot masturbation. Pretty pictures already rendered for the computationally-challenged."
Still online? No, this archive of alt.fractals.pictures is not still online, but Flickr (founded in 2004) has a decent collection with the fractals tag, and Deviantart (launched in 2000) has a collection in the fractals topic.


Hacking/Phreaking

H/P WWW Site
WWW
"A glimpse of the dark side of the Web. FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY! (yeah, right)."
Still online? No, and not archived, or even remembered!
Anything like it? So much. So very much. But let's continue.

Cult of the Dead Cow
FTPs
"These dOOdZ are dangerous! Hundreds of incredibly witty, well-written files covering everything from simple social engineering to truly wizardlike techno spoofing."
Still online? The FTP is offline, but cDc lives on with what is currently a super low bandwith landing page (ASCii!)

Phrack
E-mail and FTPs
"Phrack—what Net. Spider can be without a passing knowledge of Phrack"? The grand pappy of hacker/cracker/phreaker pubs."
Still online? The FTP links are dead, but Phrack lives on! With more ASCii, too. And the archives are basic directories of text files and tgz archives.

Surfpunk Technical Journal
Mailing List
"The 'dangerous multi-national hacker zine' is a great resource (and it's not afraid to laugh at itself). Fun and informative."
Still remembered? Yes, in an archive of WIRED from 1994, when it was much closer to the bleeding edge.

Net.Weirdness: Games/Hints/Cheats/Cracks and Generally Weird Stuff

Time for some wicked thrills! That's right, it's 1995 and you can read about video games online! Even get hints and cheats for free! But beware, they'll probably turn you into a cold-blooded killer.

Games/Hints/Cheats/Cracks

FTP sites
"Why beat your head against the screen in your quest to find out how to get past that next level? The answers are here, homey! Hints, cheats, cracks, you name it."
Still online? Ho-leey shee-it, YES! ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/doc/games/solutions/ is STILL THERE! BUT ... the directories and files won't open there. OK, looks like a dead end. But, wait ...
Still remembered? YES! That site might be a no-go, but the University of Wisconsin Parkside FTP is offline, but the MSDOS/PC Games directory is archived!
Still needed? Depends on what you want. Cracking games isn't like it used to be, where you could do a little hexediting and break the copy protections, but Game FAQs is keeping up and current, saving you from having to call up 1-900-HOT-HINTS. My favorite part is that the ASCII art and layouts live on in 2020.

Apogee Game Site
FTP
"Shareware PC game extravaganza."
Still online? Nope.
Still remembered? Yes, fondly. Well, the games are. The old FTP? Not so much.


Generally Weird Stuff

The Site Which Must Not Be Named
FTP
"Underworld Industries FTP site o' weirdness. Too strange to even get a domain name, this site is only spoken of by its cryptic IP number. Check it out."
Still online? No. I think someone else had the IP in 1996, when I checked it out. Definitely not weirdness, either.
Still remembered? Yes, seen here in High Weirdness by Email from 1992 (?!) and it seems that Underworld Industries expanded into separate "nodes" (archived) in later years.

High Weirdness by E-mail List
FTP
"One of the masterpieces of Net publishing. If you like the list you're reading now, you'll love High Weirdness by E-mail."
Still online? No, sadly.
Still remembered? Yes! I previously linked version 1.1, and here's a copy of version 2.1, 38 pages of oddities that isn't dated. Well, the links are dated, but there's no date. You dig it, right? Anyway, this grew from High Weirdness by Mail, and later evolved into Hyper-Weirdness by Web, but that faded away before being archived. Luckily, the makers of Hyper-Weirdness re-posted some of that weirdness. Also, Rev. Stang shared more/ different/ other High Weirdness by Web.

More Weirdness 
FTP
"Truly demented. From Kibo to the Carbonist Manifesto, this is the site for some of the most mind-warping stuff you'll ever open up in your text editor."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Somewhat. Here's the story behind Spies.com, "one of the first vanity domains in the world" (archived). If this seems familiar, it's because covered some of this before, under Alternative Media.

Net.Weirdness: E-Text and Zines FTP sites and Fonts of All Knowledge

E-Text and Zines FTP sites, and Fonts of All Knowledge, so much to read! Where to begin? At the beginning! (Of this section, that is.)

E-Text/Zines FTP sites

"If you ever get bored with the Net, then you're either a really fast reader or an incurably boring stiff. In case things do start to get a bit dull, there are plenty of places to get new reading material. Try FTP-ing to any of these sites."

Still online? Yes! Well, not really. The best stuff is available via Internet Archive, and [x/y] have digitally dissolved, but we still have Etext! And a few of these ISPs are still around!

• etext.archive.umich.edu (archived) became etext.org, but those files are offline, and the site now points to Internet Archive's copies.
• quartz.rutgers.edu disappeared, but was copied to ... etext, now on Internet Archive.
• http://ftp.msen.com and www.msen.com both display information about "Michigan's Best-Run Internet Service Provider™," and the actual FTP still exists, but not with anonymous access.
• http://ftp.halcyon.com actually works! So does ftp://ftp.halcyon.com! With anonymous access! But ... there's not much in all those folders. Bah.
• world.std.com is another old ISP that's still online, but no FTP.

Still remembered? Yes! Here's a great round-up of ezines from 1994 by johnl (John Labovitz), via the Google Groups archive of alt.answers, in which John warns that the list may be outdated as it hadn't been updated in a month.

"If you're a lucky little monkey with Mosaic or other Web access, you may want to check out the hypermedia linked e-zines."
Still online? No, and not archived, either.
Still remembered? Yes. Here's another copy of a posting from John, in full "hacker" black and green, plus hyperlinks (to dead sites), which captures some reference to the old Northwestern University domain and its ezine archive.


Fonts of All Knowledge

All the FAQ files
FTP
"Sometimes you just gotta know! Well, luckily there are know-it-all freaks out there who are obsessed with collecting answers to your questions."
Still online? No, and not archived.
Still remembered? Yes, on an MIT page that links to (dead) sites you may want to see.
Anything like it? Yes! FAQs.org has USENET FAQs sorted by hierarchy.

Stanford Netnews Newsreading Service
Web
"The Net rodents at Stanford have created one of the coolest services on the Net. Tell them what you're interested in and it'll comb USENET groups and mail you excerpts from articles with the info you need."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes, and my favorite source is "All the Dang Search Engines," a very impressive of embedded search engines, from when this was a common thing (well, more common than it is now), and also before Google. Here's their description of what was later renamed SIFT, the Stanford Information Filtering Tool:

"Stanford Netnews Filtering Service (e-mail search service covering net news) Netnews, or USENET News, is a bulletin board system on the Internet. It is organized into discussion groups (called newsgroups) covering a wide variety of topics, e.g., from robotics to video game tips, from food recipes to politics. Its total readership is in millions and daily traffic in tens of MBs. One problem with Netnews is the volume and diversity of information. Our filtering service allows the user to express her interests in finer granularity (using profiles) than newsgroups, and hopefully can provide a better match of interests."

That's right, tens of MBs daily! Consider now in 2017, the average webpage was 3mb, it seems like a much different time.

Alt.Urban.Legends FAQ
 FTP
"Well, my friend knew someone this happened to, so it must be real!" Right. Check the validity of most common urban legends with a brief peek at this expansive FAQ. Do killer tarantulas really inhabit cactus bought at Ikea? Of course they do.
Still online? Yes, but not that FTP. FAQs.org has the alt.folklore.urban five-part FAQ, and there's an archive of UrbanLegends.com, which is a much fancier version of the FAQ.

Interestingly, Snopes.com has been online since 1994 and is still going strong, replacing those old text files traded 'round the net. 

Net.Weirdness: Crypto and Culture Jamming

Keep yourself and your communications secure with cryptography, and keep the world weird with culture jamming!

Crypto

Clipped from Bitcoin Wiki

Cypherpunks Mailing List
Mailing List
"Wanna keep a secret? Can't get enough of that crvpto stuff? The cypherpunks are here to show you how to forge the keys of your info-freedom."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes. There was an archive of this mailing list circa 2015 according to a forum post, but that archive is gone, and not captured by the Internet Archive. John Gilmore's Toad Hall is still online, which was the domain for the mailing list. The best resource is probably the Bitcoin Wiki, which has a long page on Cypherpunk.


Crypto Software
FTP: ftp.funet.fi Directory: /pub/crypt
"Bit shredders, byte twisters, public keys, and private lives—this nifty site in Finland will keep your PC decked out in the latest crypto tech."
Still online? Yes! Really, it's still there! But before you download anything, it would be a good idea to consider when and how you want to use encryption software.

PGP and other crypto stuff
FTP: soda.berkeley.edu
"Pretty Good Privacy means keeping your plans for world domination safe from prying eyes (as well as keeping secret that special collection of pictures)."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Sort of. No crypto FTP, but Soda is remembered in the Computer Science Undergraduate Association encyclopedia, and the URL now refreshes to the CSUA website. But you can get PGP and many other iterations or alternatives now.


Culture Jamming

SenseReal Foundation
E-mail: Green Ghost
"Send mail to this guy—he's determined to keep you on the jagged edge of what exactly is going on
with stuff."
Still online? No.
Still Remembered? Yes, kinda. Phrack Magazine, issue 46, from 1994, has a (vintage) digital version online that includes The SenseReal Mission, which opens with this paragraph:

If you are reading this it indicates you have reached a point along your journey that you will have to decide whether you agree with The SenseReal Foundation or whether you think that those who believe and support The SenseReal Foundation are crazy. Your decision to join The SenseReal Foundation on it's mission will undoubtedly change your life forever. When you understand the reason it exists and what it seeks you will better know how to decide. That is why this text was created.

Harley/Biker E-list
Mailing List
"Head out on the highway! Grow a beard, pop a Bud. and thumb your nose at those Saab zombies. Keep America ugly, be a biker."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes, in a dated website of Motorcycle Mailing Lists, which includes a URL for the Harley Email Digest. It's not online anymore, but it was archived in 1997.
Do I love that summary? No, not really. Maybe just drop that last sentence?

Net.Weirdness: Conspiracy and Cool Tech

Next up: conspiracies and cool tech, piped straight to your eyeballs via FTP! Or mailing lists ...

Conspiracy

Freedom Inc.
Mailing list, send: "help" (in the subject field)
"Hundreds of files on everything ranging from constitutional challenges and government black projects to how to build your own bombs."
Still online? Nope, the domain andronix.org faded from the internet (archive), to be replaced (in search results) by andronix.app, promising "the power of a full fledged computer level operating system on your Android device."

Archived at all? Yes! Maybe? Freedom Inc. put out a range of materials, it seems. Here's a sampling of what can still be found in 2020:

• International Free Press. Vol. 1, No. 1 and Vol. 1, No. 2, "dedicated to the collection and distribution of news, stories, and other information relating to the global experience of black people."
• Possibly associated with Conspiracy Nation, as seen referenced in Vol. 1 Num. 48, and in this information on how to get back issues.

Masonic Digest
 Mailing list
"Of course, once you know the secret handshake, it doesn't seem so mysterious anymore (hand extended, with first two fingers pressed to the inside of the wrist of the shakee), but it's
important, anyway, to keep tabs on these government-running wackoids."
Still online? Not as far as I can see. Mentioned in the email from 1994, High Weirdness by E-Mail, and possibly associated with the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, which has an extensive Anti-Masonry FAQ, which also links to the alt.freemasonry FAQ, Version 1.5b.
Archived? Not as far as I can tell.


Conspiracy Archives
FTP: etext archive
"Da motha" lode of conspiracy text files. It's all here, ripe for the pickin'. Of course, the ease with which you can get this stuff makes you wonder just exactly who put it here ..." 
Still online? No.
Archived? Yes, at least some of them.


Cool Tech

VR FTP Sites
FTP: Avalon server with Navy.mil
"The virtually real for the technologically well heeled. Programs, toys, brainiac essays, and other tidbits about VR."
Still online? No.

I'm not sure if VR today means what it did 25 years ago. From Anonymous FTP Sites Listing from 1997, it looks like Navy was supporting 3D rendering, given that a mirror for those resources was POV-Ray, the Persistence of Vision Raytracer, which is now listed as "a high-quality, Free Software tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics." Here's a snapshot of the site from 1997, with some definitely "vintage" 3D graphics, and here's an old list of Graphics FTPs, where "virtual worlds" and "virtual reality" are used interchangably.


Artificial Life
Mailing list
"This is a forum for wannabe data-Frankensteins and their hunchbacked minions." 
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes! At least, in a FAQ Archive, which describes the Artificial Life Digest as such: "The ALIFE research community exchanges news, CFP's, etc. through this digest, edited by Liane Gabora and Rob Collins of the ARTIFICIAL LIFE Research Group at UCLA." It seems like Artificial Life isn't the term anymore, or perhaps the subject has fragmented into sub-topics and specialties, because I can't find an Artificial Life Research Group at UCLA now.


Future Technologies List
Mailing List
"A good place to prognosticate about cutting-edge tech."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Vaguely, captured in Cyberpoet's Guide to Virtual Culture - 3.14.94 - p3/5 (Google Groups archive of alt.cyberspace), which simply lists it as "artificial intelligence, nanotech, etc." It looks like Cyberpoet's Guide got a HTML make-over, but it doesn't include any more hints as to what the Future Technologies List covered. Now, there are hundreds of sites dedicated to future tech, existing and imagined.


TechnoNomads
Mailing List
"Can't stay in one place, but still wanna be wired? Here's a list for wireheads and gearheads on the move."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes! Steve Roberts seems to have been the guy behind the list, as he describes here, in a discussion of what to call modern techno nomads. And it sounds like's still at it, as seen on his Microship website.


Homebrew Computers—Building Your Own
Mailing List
"Build the computer of your dreams with a little help from these street techies."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Looks like it, if you can search through through this wall o' text, and also in the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, 4th edition from 1994. This is back when "IBM PC Clone" was something people talked about. 20 years later, IBM sold its Personal Computer business to Lenovo, endng the IBM PC era.

Net.Weirdness: Blowin' Money and Computer Nostalgia

The quiet days of the pre-commercial internet are a form of computer nostalgia in and of itself, but if anything, this (short!) list of unusual shopping sources is a reminder that the internet wasn't non-commercial for long. Also, a reminder that the history of computer system emulators is long, and that pining for the computer games of your youth is also not new.

Blowin' Money

Atomic Books Catalog
"Atomic Books bills itself as 'Literaty Finds for Mutated Minds. Just the
ticket, right?"
Still online? Yes! You don't need to (e)mail away for a catlog, you can just browse their website and buy books online. If you want to get physical, you can send John Waters some fanmail. "Yes. It's true. John Waters does receive fan mail through us." No email, though.

Fringeware, Inc.
"Long-time bOING bOING soul brothers Paco Xander Xathan and Jon Lebkowsky run this alternative to the cess-pit that is commercial retail merchandising."
Still online? Yes, but as a digital tombstone. The site currently states that "As of 1 July 1999, our store has closed. We may reopen a store in Austin as some point in the future. Many thanks to all of our customers and friends over the years." They went online the year after the Handbook was published, and still feature three buttons, "As featured on Netscape Cool Sitings" (dead link; archived), "Subbrilliant Sertified" (still viable), and "Operation MindPhuck" (dead webring link).
Still remembered? Yes, there's a decently detailed Wikipedia article on the (associated) FringeWare Review, and the Internet Archive has Issue #6(66) digitized, while Anarchivism has a bit more info, and notes that there were 14 issues.

Computer Nostalgia

Mac Apple II emulator—Stop the Madness!
"If your eyes mist over when someone mentions Karateka, if you get allquivery just thinking about your thousandth-generation copy of Castle Wolfenstein, and you own a Mac, check this out. Stop the Madness! is your all-access ticket to geek memorabilia. Relive the pimply-faced joys of your digital youth."
Still online? In a form. One of the two FTPs, cassandra.ucr.edu, was archived in 2003, but there's no "apple2" directory. But Zophar's Domain has a copy of Stop the Madness!, which notes "This is one of the first Apple II emulators. It runs very fast and is compatible with most Apple II software. This'll even run well on your 68040's! Does not emulate the Apple IIgs."

Anything like it? Yes! The emulation scene is alive and well, and virtual machines are up and running online, for free! The most notable collection is the Internet Archive's 4am collection of Apple II software, with a focus on titles that were rare or previously not distributed online. Now, if you want to play Karateka, you have your choice of versions, and you can browse documentation, too! The same goes for Castle Wolfenstein.

Net.Weirdness: Anonymity and Archie Servers

Anonymity (in email)
"Anonymous remailers let you send e-mail with the total assurance that you and only you will know who sent it."
Still online? None of the listed servers appear to be online. An archived snapshot of penet.fi from 1996 announced that anon.penet.fi anonymous forwarding services were coming to an end.
Anything like them? Yes, and in fact, there are three levels of anonymous remailers, as described by Wikipedia.

Archie Servers
"The Net is a huge place and nobody's gonna hold your hand as you travel through it. Luckily, even if no human can help you find things, there's a friendly Net know-it-all named Archie who can."

Today, you'd be forgiven for asking "you mean, like Google?" It feels like Google has been online since the beginning of The Net, but it started in 1997 at Stanford, as captured by the Internet Archive. But a decade earlier, Archie, the first internet search engine was sleuthing through McGill University School of Computer Science's FTP files.

From there, it sounds like Archie changed from a single system searcher, to a global network of interconnected regional search engines. Most Archies are long-gone, replaced by major search engines with increased abilities to search farther and faster, but this Polish Archie is still online, with the same graphic user interface since 1997, very similar looking to Rutgers' Archie (archived).

Net.Weirdness: Alternative Media

Net.Weirdness, part 2: Alternative Media

What's alternative? (What's media?) Let's see what it looked like in 1995?

Back of Air Pirates Funnies, 1971

Survival Research Labs
FTP: srl.org
"Pictures, updates, and propaganda from the most well-known industrial performance art group—Survival Research Laboratories."

Still online? Yes! Finally, a survivor! Well, their FTP has been replaced by a website at the same domain. "Dangerous and Disturbing Mechanical Presentations Since 1979" is their tagline, and it looks like they've kept at it.


Comix List
Mailing List
"Catch the latest in comix talk—just don't mention the Fantastic Four or any other mainstream comic book pabulum."

Still online? No internet record of the comixreqest mailing list, but their ISP, The World, is still going strong. Even more impressive, The World was the first commercial ISP. You can also find plenty of information on and discussions of "comix," where the "x" was/is used to differentiate from the mainstream (and to emphasize x-rated, which is also found in non-mainstream comics).


Sci-Fi Book Reviews
Gopher: gopher net.bio.net
"How come every time you go into a bookstore you can't remember any of the cool titles you've heard about? [...] Next time, before you go shopping, check out this Gopher site. It reviews just about every new and old sci-fi book."

Still online? First, support for the gopher protocol is a rare thing these days, "yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)." But second, bio.net is still online and supporting open science communication, and has an archive that includes references to its past gopher access. Apparently, the sci-fi reviews were tucked away among discussions on maize and urodele amphibians.

And third, there is no shortage of Sci-Fi book reviews and information collections on the internet at large. One notable source is The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which started in 1995, home to information on not only science fiction, but also fantasy and horror.


Factsheet Five—Electronic Edition 
FTP: etext.archive.umich.edu
Gopher: well.sf.ca.us
"Here are reviews of just about every zine on the planet, sensibly organized, and presented for your browsing pleasure. Make sure that you buy copies of the paper version of Factsheet Five, too—if these folks go out of business, the world will immediately grind to a halt."

Still online? No.
Archived? A version of etexts, yes, and a few editions of the hardcopy are available via the Internet Archive (late 1980s through early 1990s). Mike Gunderloy, the maniac (in the best sense of the world) behind Factsheet Five, donated his zine collection and business files related to FF to the New York State Library, as documented here.


Wiretap Online Library 
FTP: wiretap.spies.com
"The repository for every bit of nuttiness committed to electrons and zapped over the Internet."

Still online? No.
Archived? Yes, in a fashion. It's the web presence of what was an FTP (and gopher service). There's also a lot of "nuttiness" in the web at large now, so there's definitely more oddities and weirdness to capture, but this is definitely a fine collection of the fringe and freaky.

Net.Weirdness: AI and Aliens

"[A] compendium of some of the tastiest parts of the Net." Yes. Yes, I am here for this, for the "gnarly edges to the global data-mushroom." What has survived for 25 years? What got copied by the Internet Archive? And what has completely disappeared? Let's find out!

Schwa Corporation, posted to Facebook in Nov. 2011

- AI -

Telnet: debra.dgbt.doc.ca 3000
"Humanity got ya down? Wanna spend some time in scintillating conversation with a machine? Telnet here and chat with an Artificial Intelligence bot."

Still online? No.
Does anyone remember it? Yes! Maybe?
"Another useful source of government information is the Communications Research Centre gopher at EBRA.DGBT. DOC.CA. In the directory called 'open government project' is a section on Supreme Court rulings. Located here is a transcript of the recent Rodriguez case. This site is well worth watching because it is planning to have addresses of MPs, Senators and Supreme Court Judges available shortly. Other directories of the DEBRA.DGBT.DOC.CA site provide documents of Industry Canada as well as access to other government gophers such as those at Natural Resources Canada, Statistics Canada and the National Library of Canada. And in these are listings of services as well as full-text documents."
Source: Access to Government Information
By Richard Malinski, Chief Librarian, Ryerson Polytechnic University

Anything like it now? Yes! There are enough to warrant a Top 7 of 2020 list, no telnet necessary. 


- Aliens -

Schwa Corporation
Web: http://www.scs.unr.edu/homepage/rory/schwa/schwa.html
"Be protected! Aliens are among us and you may have already been abducted and not know it. How can you be helped? Schwa has all the answers (and the products that go along with them)."

Still online? No.
Archived? Nope, seems it was offline by April 1999
Remembered? Yes! Wired has an article from 1994 on Schwa, with a bit more information, and Wikipedia has various updates, and Laughing Squid captured some of William "Bill" Barker's second phase, alaVoid, but sadly it seems that Bill Barker is offline, again.


Paranet Information Service
Mailing List: infopararequest-at-scicom.aphacdc.com
"Paranet Information Service is standing by with up-to-the-minute info on alien infiltration, weird sightings, odd happenings, and other extraterrestrial events."

Still online? No.
Archived? No, but yes.
What? There was a Paranet BBS, and there's this snapshot of old discussions, captured on the Internet Archive.
Anything like it now? Plenty, but it seems like a lot of alien/ UFO discussions get muddied (or polluted) with racists, so it's hard to link to anything that doesn't include a lot of that junk. Surfer beware.


UFO/Alien/Space Pictures
FTP: Vab02.larc.nasa.gov
"While we wonder about government cover-ups, NASA has been archiving UFO pictures right under our noses! FTP on over there and see grainy and blurry evidence that aliens are among us."

Still online? No.
Archived? Not quite. The Internet Archive captured the web presence of vab02 from 1997, but the Vehicle Analysis Branch (VAB) of Langley Research Center (LaRC) doesn't appear to have much in the way of blurry UFO pics, though it does have a page of Advanced Launch Vehicles & Planetary Flight, including some pictures of (identified) spacecraft.
Anything like it now? I'm not sure what Vab02 had back in the day, but quite recently, the U.S. Navy declassified and confirmed leaked three videos of UFOs from 2004 and 2015, and before that, the NSA released older documentation of unidentified flying objects that came to light thanks to the work of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy.

Tom Jennings: Gardening in Cyberspace

Jennings (left) at ROFLcon 2, by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
The FIDOnet logo ought to be attributed to (jm)

Tom Jennings turned down a lucrative gig or five, including a job in Cupertino, for freedom to make things the way he wants to. That includes FIDOnet, a file-transfer protocol for BBSes, and The Little Garden (TLG), the world's first Internet Service Provider (ISP) based on the "toasternet" model (private, Internet-connected networks built from bizarre mixtures of old hardware and software).

"[I]t's kind of fun to thumb your nose at the business creeps by doing their job better than they do. I take my anarcho stuff very seriously that's why I don't compete. I just work around them. I do stuff that they're NOT going to do, and hopefully, I do it well. So far, this has proven to be a good thing."

The anarcho stuff included the '80s queer skatepunk zine Homocare, which Tom archived on his website, Sensitive Research (SR-IX), which he's still updating. There you can find more of Tom's code, comments on old tech, artwork, writing, and his AMC (American Motors) and Rambler page. If you want to read more about Tom, Jason Scott wrote a nice article on his weblog.

But other things referenced by Will Kreith in this article are gone: The Little Garden (both the ISP, and the Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that the ISP was named for), and the reference to "the 'gold rush' of business on the Internet" in 1995 is humorous, in that it was years ahead of the Dot Com bubble (and burst).

Cyberspace for 25¢

In 1991, Wayne Gregori wanted to bring the internet to the people, and not just the usual computer people who were already on BBSes. He and his wife, Jill, realized they could put coin-operated computers in public spaces that were used by a wider range of people, and thus the Internet Café was born. By 1995, there were a few more, like the @ Cafe, one of New York City’s first internet cafes

And Finnish capital Helsinki’s internet cool...

Helsinki CompuCafe video from 1995 from Larri Helminen on Vimeo.

Gizmodo covered the weird, sketchy history of internet cafes in 2015, including Wayne's role in the start of all this, and how they became centers for gamers, allowing people to play the newest games on the newest computers. The internet café was replaced by the gamer café. But where's Wayne?

His bio on Speakerhub lists him as "a technologist and entrepreneur that has the rare talent of translating the complex world of Bitcoin and blockchain out of the abstract and into concrete, real world examples in a fluid and entertaining manner."

In 1995, Wayne said "for some people SF Net is sheer entertainment, for others it is the support network they never had, and still for others it is simply a way to get a little closer to people and make life more enjoyable." SF Net filled that for a while, but not for the long haul.

The website for his coin-op internet access, SFnet.com, was captured in 1996, when it offered the chance to "build your own eccentric online world by accomodating the odd-balls and free-thinkers who frequent the cafes and bars in your area." But by 1997, it was reborn as a rental and room-mate finding service, and the next year, it had a similar logo but was now a database to webpage integration service. For a while, it was associated with a "sales intelligence exchange," before going dormant for years. In 2011, it was reborn as the San Francisco Resource Link Network, but that didn't last, either. The domain was for sale for a period, and now it's home to the Secured Finance Network.

Bye-Bye Bozo!

"Every day, hundreds of people are using e-mail for the first time. It's wonderful to have your friendsonline, but unfortunately, there are a lot of bumbling new users and obnoxious Net weirdos who'll obtain your e-mail address and start to bug you. We've developed a few surefire methods to get rid of these time-wasters and keep them from clogging up your mail box."

Ad from PC Magazine, Nov. 21, 1995

We may take email filters and spam traps for granted now, but Eudora is specifically mentioned as "an intelligent e-mail system" that includes filters to auto-delete messages from certain users, akin to a Kill File, Twit List or Bozo Bin for USENET. WIRED also mentions The WELL's Bozo Filter in a 1993 (digitized?) article, and the bozo filter lives on, at least in the Free Dictionary.

If filters don't work, or aren't hands-on enough, Mark Frauenfelder suggests replying to chain emails with mutated copies. In case you missed this period of the internet, this was a thing in the 1990s, and have returned in 2020 as a way to share recipes and spread uplifting news (though not everyone welcomes these), instead of reviving chain letters with offers of wealth and threats of death from the early digital age.

And a suggestion for the clingy i-buddy who won't take your lack of reply as a subtle hint to bug off, Mark suggests sending a "mail-bomb" with something dull you find online, "like a deadly dull 100-page government policy document about railroad land use," as a way of distracting someone. This was also the time before increasingly large (online) email storage, when a 20mb attachment could also be considered a "mail bomb" in that it would fill your inbox and prevent you from receiving or sending any other emails.

Eudora was retired in 2006, replaced by Thunderbird, a collaboration between Qualcomm and Mozilla. In 2019, the number of global e-mail users amounted to 3.9 billion, which is a good chunk of the 7.7 billion people on earth that year. Gmail is globally the predominant email provider, with a few other major providers vying for a cut of that (broadly ad-sponsored, free to end user) market, which is primarily web-based. Desktop (or laptop) clients are still common for business users, but often paired with web clients. Automatic spam filtering is a given, and Gmail sorts emails into categories by default.

Most people treat this as a positive thing, simplifying their lives and decisions, but important emails can get automagically tossed into a bozo bin, such as political emails. If you want more control over your email, you'll have to pay for it. But it's still free-free to send mutant replies and policy documents.

Net.Bozo Field Guide Part 2: (retro) tech review

One way to identify those ten net bozos was by their tech. Looking back, you may have forgotten (or never known) some of those systems, so let's reminisce about the internet portals of 1995!

Hacking the Gibson -- "Rabbit, flu shot, someone talk to me!"

I mentioned some of the now-obsolete tech in the prior post, but let's dig deeper here:

• newbie: "AOL e-mail address, uses Performa system bought on Sears credit card." In 1995, AOL was still trying to pitch the idea of the internet in general, as seen in this ad, back when they were offering 10 free hours. Seven years later, AOL would be giving away 1,025 hours for 45 days, then up to 90 days free. And in 2004, Sears was bought by Kmart in an $11 billion deal, which might sound significant, until you see how much Microsoft spent in the mid-2000s. And that Performa? There were a number of models available in 1995, and the following year, the Performa 6360 was pitched as a low-cost multimedia Mac, shipped for just $1,499.
• knowbot: "Sun Workstation, T1 Internet connection. Claims to have taught Ed Kroll everything he knows about the Net." A Sun Ultra 1 workstation was definitely more significant than the newbie's Mac, but it was about 18 times as expensive as the Performa 6360, at $27,995. I didn't find a price quote for a T1 in 1995 (and the cost would vary from market to market), but this 2017 article states that connection starts at about $250 per month and can be as much as $1200 per month.
• t.m.n.h. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Hacker): "[What they claim:] Sun SPARCbook bought with
  stolen credit card number [What they ACTUALLY have:] Tandy 386 bought by parents for X-mas." That's a radical 640-by-480 resolution, for a mere $11,950 for the SPARCbook workstation-class notebook. The Tandy was about 1/6th that cost, and not terribly portable.
• floodgater: "Uses coin-operated computer at the Laundromat. State-of-the art robo-posting software." I can imagine that in much of the world, this sounds very dated, but you can still buy coin-operated computers. I imagine that t's far more common to find free WiFi in laundromats now.
• crotch potato (AKA the erotic neurotic): "SLIP-connected Mac II running Newswatcher for instant decoding of binary images." The Mac II was officially discontinued 5 years before the Handbook, so it'd be a second-hand box in 1995.
• techno shaman: "Potato-Battery powered PB 540C with tribal tattoo-covered pointing pad carried around in a pouch hand-macramed by Balinese tribespeople." That's the PowerBook 540c, and the potato-powered bit was probably a joke, but it's not unfeasible.
• .sig the destroyer: "Any pure ASCII terminal. Avoids Mac and Windows like the plague, cause styled text is .sig's worst enemy." I'll wimp out on this challenge, and leave the image of a pure ASCII terminal to your imagination.
• bitraker: "Toshiba laptop." $500.
• techno hippie: "Homebuilt 386 built from DigiKey parts. Runs off of solar power or cow-methane gas generator." DigiKey is still around, and digging around their site, it looks like they still sell computer parts. I think that homebuilt PCs are a bit easier to make since 1995, if nothing else for the extensive online communities of homebuilders and modders.
• net.spider: "PowerPC, PB 540C, Sony Magic Link, 28.8 modem. Working on building a toasternet in basement." PowerPC ("RISC is good"). Magic Link is an early PDA, "but it's not [just] that." 28.8 modem was a snapshot of a period between 14.4 and 56k. Toasternet is another bit of old jargon, referring to a network of inexpensive, low-powered computers, or "toasters."

There you are, up to speed on the tech of yester-year!

Net.Bozo Field Guide

Who's out there, poking away at devices, connected across and around the world via The Information Mine? Gareth Branwyn helpfully categorized 10 key categories of Net Bozos, with their attributes on handy front-and-back cards, so you could clip and review these, should you wish.

Three of card illustrations, over a hastily made vintage pattern,
sourced from a 1950's Franciscan Atomic Starburst Patterned plate

Are these bozos still found online? More or less:

• newbie: no longer needs AOL, and probably doesn't buy The official America Online Internet Guide, but they're still online, still falling for get rich quick scams, and this tag is still understood. "Still has a life offline. Can answer daily e-mail in one sitting." This kinda stings ;)
• knowbot: yeah, still prevalent, but definitely not by that name. "Internet expert" is probably a fitting tag/ put-down as anything. Instead of writing "read the fucking manual!" it's "do your own research!" or linking to LMGTFY.
• t.m.n.h. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Hacker): still around, and this tag would be understood, but the term "hacker" has been sullied by so many surly youth who download "hack packs" of pre-packaged tools that "hacker" is generally agreed to be someone who breaks into a system. Before this, the exploratory hackers of old tried to coin cracker for those who would maliciously break into systems.
• floodgater: this sounds more like sad, lonely people who thought the internet would be a connection to other people that they couldn't find offline. They still exist, still seeking someone to listen.
• crotch potato (AKA the erotic neurotic): less than a decade after the Handbook was published, the joke that the internet is for porn was set to music, with puppets. The need to have special software to decode images is so far behind us, but this isn't the only really dated bozo category. Yes, crotch potato is a fantastic tag and could be used much more, but it's so much easier to be access porn now than in 1995.
• techno shaman: I feel like Gareth was more tuned into or focused on certain corners of the internet, giving them greater representation than perhaps justifies a tag. Check out the old index to archive of alt.* newsgroups for an idea of what some people valued and stored. Still, this is another sign that the Happy Mutant Handbook was right up my alley.
• .sig the destroyer: Another reference that died shortly after the publication of this book. Signature blocks haven't completely gone away, and live on both in some forums, and emails. To be honest, I'm surprised that Kibo wasn't mentioned here.
• bitraker: like a muckraker, but on the internet, and they still exist. But instead of browsing through Usenet, The Well and AOL, they probably use Google Alerts to have new information about whatever beat they cover.
• techno hippie: "First colonists of cyberspace. Been around since the Homebrew days, when Whole Earth Review the bleeding-edge of cyberculture mags. Likes to listen the Dead while navigating c-space." This is another part of the history of the internet, with another focus on The WELL, and it references Hackers. But it also circles back to virtual conferences, which are a hot topic in 2020, for very different reasons that there were virtual conferences in 1995.
• net.spider: "takes pride in being everywhere on the Net at once." That's a lot harder now, but there are definitely sources for original content that gets spread elsewhere, and being the first to know is something some still take pride in now. It feels a bit like trying to be a Renaissance person now, when the are so many more topics to know, let alone master, than there 25 years ago. But the thing that irks me is the tag. One of the first internet indexers, or web crawlers, was renamed Spidey in 1995. In other words, human "net spiders" were already being replaced by bots by then. In 2019, 37.2% of all traffic on the internet last year wasn't human.

Updating this list of internet characters is on my to-do list, once I finish my review of the Happy Mutant Handbook. But up next, I'll look at the tech of these ten net bozos, and how you can block a bozo in 1995.

your.name@here

This is a topic that hasn't aged well. In the age of inundation by spam and scams, search for "email spoofing" and the majority of pages are something like How Spammers Spoof Your Email Address (and How to Protect Yourself).

Email spoofing is about as old as the internet, because the internet was built as an optimistic space among like-minded geeks, not opportunistic scammers.

Speaking of scammers, there are sites and services one can buy to spoof emails (and text messages, and phone calls). But can you still telnet to a server? Yes! It's not straight-forward, but you can still learn how to use the telnet client in Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 10, or how to get telnet for MacOS in Mojave or High Sierra. And once you're telnetting it up, here are 5 more fun things available via telnet, at least as of 2014. In addition to connecting to BBSes.

Better Living Through Silicon

"Computers bore Happy Mutants. They do a half-assed job at sending signals to your eyes and ears, while the real world can send ultra-high resolution data to all of your senses. So why is everybody sitting around in front of these lousy boxes all day, staring at blocky pictures and typing out chunky-looking text?"

My initial response was "oh shit, Handbook, you have no idea." May 2020 is a very different place from any point in '95. Let's pretend that COVID-19 isn't the only change in the world.

The Process to end all Processes is back!

First, no love for Smell-O-Vision? Anyway, screen resolution has come a long way in 25 years. Check out PC TV, and watch the future, as of 1996:

If you want to geek out on the details, check out evolution of desktop Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), from 1995 to 2020, or reminisce at length over the history of computer display standards. In short, the blocky visuals of the 1990s have been replaced by optical resolution, pixels so small that the screen appears to recreate reality ... in 2D. But we live in 3D, so why aren't we watching 3D? Well, that has a lengthy history, too.

"OK, what about the inputs?" asks the mutant of the past. "Are we still banging away on keyboards?" Yes, and we're poking screens now! And computers are listening! All the time! Isn't that great? "Sure, sure, future person. But what are you doing with all that?" Well, lots of things. There's still a lot of staring at screens, but also talking to (and shouting at) people around the world! How great is that? And artificial life is still an active and evolving (harhar) field!

Onwards, into the retro-future of Better Living Through Silicon!

Billboard Liberation Front

"Picture this: you're driving, it's 8 A.M.. coffee is clutched to your chest as you amble toward work in a stupor. You look up, and a billboard for a radio station that used to read 'HITS HAPPEN—NEW X 100' now reads 'SHIT HAPPENS—NEW EXXON.' Whoa! That snaps you out of your trance."

That's one example of the work of the Billboard Liberation Front, who have been modifying, mocking, and manipulating public-facing media since 1977. My favorite:

Laughing Squid has a copy of the BLF's press release, celebrating AT&T's collaboration with NSA in 2008. In 2015, the truly vast scale of that collaboration came to light, a few years after the BLF had retired.

The good news is that the BLF's website is still up, hosting the guide "The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement" (PDF), so you don't have to write away to Processed World magazine and hope they have a copy (they stopped making new zines in 2005).

And despite the fact that the BLF is all for modifying corporate messages, they also realize that there's some schmuck whose job is to maintain those billboards, so they never paint or damage the billboard. Instead, to make it easy and safe, the BLF leaves instructions for the workers to restore the billboard to its original, boring state.

Hacking

"No section on reality hacking would be complete without a screed about computer programming, the original form of hacking. This essay is by Rudy Rucker, a contributor to the Great Work of the third millennium: building machines that are alive." —editors

Bold introduction, but he's an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. And he founded an ISP for punks and small businesses in San Francisco in 1998! (And his web portal is somewhat stuck in that era, referencing a  He's lauded by fellow cyberpunk founder William Gibson (who might have broader name recognition). Let's say it's a fitting preamble and leave it at that.

"A computer program is a virtual machine that you build by hand. Hacking is like building a car by building all of the parts in the car individually. The good thing is that you have full control, the bad thing is that the process can take so much longer than you expect it to. Are you sure you feel like stamping out a triple-0 z-ring gasket? And compositing the plastic from which to make the gasket? The hacker says, 'Yaar! Sounds like fun!' "

But in 2012, Rudy was looking decades back, before the age of computers with a certain fondness: "When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden."

I realize that hacking or programming is not the same thing as living in the modern computer age, where there are endless feeds of information to the point of complete distraction. And I can recall people, even young adults, griping about the speed of communication and the implied obligation of instant replies, in the mid 1990s.

So let's instead focus on how far we've come in world of programming from 1995, when the way to start was take a course on C or buy a C compiler and start working through examples. Now, it's much easier to start coding, with online teaching platforms like Code Academy, and there's a broad push to get kids interested and involved in computer science at a young age, with online resources like Code.org.

"Hacking teaches that the secret of the universe need not be so very complex, provided that the secret is set down in a big enough space of computation equipped with feedback and parallelism." Programming can still open up windows to other worlds, once you understand the languages.