MindVox |
MindVox was a famed early , and open to the public in November of that year.
MindVox was the second ISP in New York City [http://wired-vig.wired.com/news_drop/news_lycatalog/story/0,2149,3085,00.html]. Some controversy over this latter statement exists [http://it.slashdot.org/comments.plsid=136218&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=95&tid=172&tid=17&mode=thread&cid=11382332]; however, by the time the first MindVox test message was posted to 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 MindVox logo shown to the right was its original ASCII art banner, appearing on the text-only service s Dial-up access login page. MindVox was originally accessible only through Telnet, ftp and direct dial-up. Its existence predates the invention of SSH and widespread use of the World Wide Web by several years. In later years, MindVox was also accessible via the web [http://web.archive.org/web/19961111052514/http://phantom.com/].
The parent company, Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. took its name from a hacking program written by Kroupa during his early teens, called Phantom Access [http://www.textfiles.com/apple/DOCUMENTATION/phantom.access2].
MindVox functioned both as a private name was rumored to be well-earned.)
Prominent MindVox evangelists included sci-fi author [http://new.ryze.com/view.phpwho=RTercek].
= Voices in My Head =
MindVox was deeply connected to the emerging non-academic 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 [http://www.textfiles.com/100/lozers.hum], [http://www.phrack.org/show.phpp=42&a=3], [http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS4/cud441.txt], [http://www.phrack.org/show.phpp=36&a=5], [http://www.wbglinks.net/pages/history/] and into the pages of books describing him as the .
= 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 ), was the name given to MindVox s conferencing system [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/FAQ/faq-1.01]. platform and operating system, with which MindVox was developed and launched.
As much as Patrick Kroupa s Voices focused the media and counter-culture spotlight on MindVox; Fancher s software was a source of tremendous attention in many MindVox-related stories and its unlikely that MindVox would have enjoyed its success without Voice [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Media/AssociatedPress1.html]. At the time MindVox launched, it was one of the first public-access ISPs in the world. The major technical difference between MindVox and every other system at the time, was instead of expecting newcomers to understand Unix and meet a cryptic Command_prompt, the entire system was accessible through Fancher s highly-flexible interface [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Media/Boredwatch.html].
The original Waffle software was written by [http://www.rotten.com]. Going to Rotten s search page [http://www.rotten.com/search], 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 [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/FAQ/faq-2.43], included a web interface [http://web.archive.org/web/19961111052514/http://phantom.com/], 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 [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/DOCUMENTS/bufu], a proprietary chat system written for MindVox by employee David Schenfeld, which spun off into the commercial product [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/MENUS/chat]), 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 [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/FAQ/faq-2.43].
The last sentence in the paragraph quoted above could be applied to many features present in the MindVox shell [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/DOCUMENTS/shell], [http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/mindvox.words.txt]. It included advanced conferencing features that software in 2005 is still lacking [http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/beta/2005/07/easiest_upgrade.html] 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 MindVox site continues its relationship with NeXT/NeXTSTEP, now in the form of Apple Computer s Mac OS X. Instead of using PHP, Perl or Active Server Pages, the entire site runs Apple s WebObjects [http://www.apple.com/WebObjects].
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 [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Akashic/NYTimes3.html]. Ironically enough this happened a few months after New York Magazine voted MindVox as one of the three best ISP s in New York [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Media/NewYork2.html].
A public message [http://web.archive.org/web/19961111052536/phantom.com/announcement.html] noted that free telnet access to the MindVox servers would still be available after the shutdown, but this did not last. Users were given the option to transfer their accounts to company Interport Communications, but 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 [http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,3085,00.html]. But none of the theories provided realistic answers as to why the final days of MindVox seem to be closer to [http://web.archive.org/web/20031116040706/www.kenkappel.com/pdf/Telephone-Conversation-September-28-1995.pdf].
A 1999 article by Tom Higgins, a rock musician and MindVox user, 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. [http://www.mindvox.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MindVoxUI.woa/wa/staticpage%3fpagename=Akashic/MindVoxFC.html]
In 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 [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Akashic/NYTimes3.html], while Wired was still covering an apparently open and at least partially operational MindVox circa 1997 [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Akashic/Wired7.html].
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 awhile, to support a community after its modem lines were turned off.
By 2001 Kroupa was back in the public eye and openly acknowledged being a lifelong heroin addict, who had finally kicked heroin and cocaine through the use of the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine [http://www.ibogaine.co.uk/patrick.htm].
During 2000 a variety of MindVox pieces went back online [http://web.archive.org/web/20010309141332/http://mindvox.com/], at phantom.com and additional material was released by MindVox to textfiles.com .
In 2005, MindVox was featured in two documentary films. Bruce Fancher is interviewed in [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/], [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460402/], and Patrick Kroupa plays himself in Ibogaine: Rite of Passage [http://www.ibogainefilm.com/], [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0431823/].
=Later Incarnations=
As of 2005 the mindvox.com website, credited to The People Impersonating MindVox Management and apparently authored by Kroupa and Fancher, has become a hub of activity in the fields of Harm Reduction [http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/News/HRC2004.html], Drug Reform [http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/News/2002Paris.html], [http://billstclair.com/blog/stories/ibogaine.html], [http://billstclair.com/blog/stories/ibogaine2.html], and psychedelic drugs (most notably Ibogaine) [http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/], [http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/IbogaineList.html], [http://www.advancedhealthtransitions.com/media01.html].
It has a variety of high-traffic lists covering these topics as well as various other issues. The community has taken on a completely new life; the interactive system itself, and the internal conferences and other services it provided, have not returned (despite announcements and plans heralding the perpetually-delayed rebirth of MindVox) [http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Home/NewsVox.html], [http://web.archive.org/web/19991129054703/www.mindvox.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MindVox].
Whatever the future holds for MindVox, it remains as one of the most-referenced foundations that formed the concept of online communities in cyberspace, and one of the stars of the pre-WWW internet [http://www.everything2.com/index.plnode=Mindvox].
=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.mindvox.com/ *http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/|
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