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).