FAGS BURN IN HELL, The World of TMoK and Area Code 401
by Jarett/Squinky/AIDS
What to say about the 401 text file scene?
Well, in the beginning there was a guy named Daver, who was bored in the
summer of nineteen-and-ninety-two, and decided he'd "hack" FrontDoor and
post some fake messages to a local BBS message network, called New
England Net.
He posted this message as "R0bin h00d" and demanded that NENET stop
requiring the use of real names, and allow people to post with handles. A
huge broo-ha-ha ensued. We honestly belived this was something worth
fighting over.
We were also 14.
(New England Net, by the way, was the brain child of a convicted child
molestor named Mike Labbe. He's a reoccurring theme through a lot of these
files.)
Daver went a step further and threw a BBS up on his Amiga 2000, running
software he himself had coded, called The Ministry of Knowledge.
The third and possibly most important action on Daver's part was to start
up an e'zine called Rhode Island Computer Underground Society (RICUS),
which gave all of the people who had been reading his BBS and supporting
R0bin H00d in the various local Networks a place to put whatever crap they
submitted.
(Right now, I want to apologize for these files. I'm responsible for a
good many of them. So are some people that are still friends of mine. They
might not be once they find out I've given the text to Jason "Every
Underscore That Blinks is Gold" Scott. These files are bad. Really bad.)
RICUS itself was derivative of another zine called Syndetic Illuminati,
which I believe is the first modern 401 e'zine. I believe two issues of it
were released, but as you can see, they are missing from this archive.
This brings me to another point--
This archive is representative of only about 1/3rd (if that) of the text
files that were written during the period, which I would estimate runs
from Early Summer 1992-Late 1995. A lot, and I mean A LOT, of stuff is
missing. If any of you out there have it, please, submit it, so that I may
be humiliated even further.
RICUS caused a gigantic windfall of text files; and the Ministry of
Knowledge is where the vast majority of them went. SpEakEr FoR the PEoPLE,
S0NS 0F LIBERTY (ahem!), etc, etc. A lot of them aren't here. You'll see
for yourself.
Anyway, there's not much I can say about these files that they can't say
for themselves. What I still find interesting about them, however, is how
much of a cultural vacuum they existed in. *Maybe* five of the people
other than Daver had ever read a text file before RICUS, and it shows.
These files exist mostly outside of the common conception of what a text
file is; People writing here had never even heard of cDc until at least a
year after they started writing. Or Phrack. If this was art, and it's not,
it would be considered a great example of 'outsider art', which is a silly
term, but applicable.
That's it. If you have any that aren't here, *please* submit them.
T E X T F I L E S
BBS Textfiles
While the vast majority of the textfiles on this site came from Bulletin
Board Systems (BBSes), a much smaller percentage concern themselves with
the actual nuts-and-bolts issues, heartaches, triumphs, and wonder of the
BBSes themselves. This section covers those files specifically.
Imagine a simple home computer, maybe an Apple II or Commodore 64, sitting
in a basement of a suburban house, or maybe in the bedroom of a young
computer kid, waiting eagerly for the next calling to come down the second
phone line (or even the only phone line, late at night) so that the single
user could read and post messages, upload and download files, or ask the
SysOp (system operator) if they wanted to chat. This was the single node
of power which gave hundreds of kids the platform to express themselves or
affect the world around them, one caller at a time.
These files rank among my favorites; reading the rants about the rules
of the BBSes, the distant but emotionally powerful networks that rose
between groups of people who never met, and the glimpses you are given
into how it was to have your machine running a message base, hoping that
you were going to get the most "posts" of any of the boards running in
your neighborhood. Fantastic.
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