64 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
64 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
FAGS BURN IN HELL, The World of TMoK and Area Code 401
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by Jarett/Squinky/AIDS
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What to say about the 401 text file scene?
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Well, in the beginning there was a guy named Daver, who was bored in the
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summer of nineteen-and-ninety-two, and decided he'd "hack" FrontDoor and
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post some fake messages to a local BBS message network, called New
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England Net.
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He posted this message as "R0bin h00d" and demanded that NENET stop
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requiring the use of real names, and allow people to post with handles. A
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huge broo-ha-ha ensued. We honestly belived this was something worth
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fighting over.
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We were also 14.
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(New England Net, by the way, was the brain child of a convicted child
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molestor named Mike Labbe. He's a reoccurring theme through a lot of these
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files.)
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Daver went a step further and threw a BBS up on his Amiga 2000, running
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software he himself had coded, called The Ministry of Knowledge.
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The third and possibly most important action on Daver's part was to start
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up an e'zine called Rhode Island Computer Underground Society (RICUS),
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which gave all of the people who had been reading his BBS and supporting
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R0bin H00d in the various local Networks a place to put whatever crap they
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submitted.
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(Right now, I want to apologize for these files. I'm responsible for a
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good many of them. So are some people that are still friends of mine. They
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might not be once they find out I've given the text to Jason "Every
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Underscore That Blinks is Gold" Scott. These files are bad. Really bad.)
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RICUS itself was derivative of another zine called Syndetic Illuminati,
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which I believe is the first modern 401 e'zine. I believe two issues of it
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were released, but as you can see, they are missing from this archive.
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This brings me to another point--
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This archive is representative of only about 1/3rd (if that) of the text
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files that were written during the period, which I would estimate runs
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from Early Summer 1992-Late 1995. A lot, and I mean A LOT, of stuff is
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missing. If any of you out there have it, please, submit it, so that I may
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be humiliated even further.
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RICUS caused a gigantic windfall of text files; and the Ministry of
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Knowledge is where the vast majority of them went. SpEakEr FoR the PEoPLE,
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S0NS 0F LIBERTY (ahem!), etc, etc. A lot of them aren't here. You'll see
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for yourself.
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Anyway, there's not much I can say about these files that they can't say
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for themselves. What I still find interesting about them, however, is how
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much of a cultural vacuum they existed in. *Maybe* five of the people
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other than Daver had ever read a text file before RICUS, and it shows.
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These files exist mostly outside of the common conception of what a text
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file is; People writing here had never even heard of cDc until at least a
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year after they started writing. Or Phrack. If this was art, and it's not,
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it would be considered a great example of 'outsider art', which is a silly
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term, but applicable.
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That's it. If you have any that aren't here, *please* submit them.
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