by Joshua Cohen
Access to [the] Diatessaron was free—it was not equipped to process payments online—neither was there a fee for the [daily? weekly?] email, which was a hyperlinkdump of all the sites that’d appeared since the previous email, both alphabetized and crossclassified by url within host/domain. Admission to this elist, however, required each prospective recipient to file at least eight unique site identifications and descriptions, while to remain on the elist required filing a further two IDs and Descris if not uniquely then [biweekly? bimonthly?]. The updating, and the compiling of the email, were funded by subscriptions to a print directory, published [irregularly], which didn’t just reproduce the site in intransitive hardcopy, but synthesized it too. This was “The Rainbow Pages” (O’Quinn). Or “The Online Phonebook” (de Groeve). It contained both halves of an updated Diatessaron, but unlike the site it interpolated the emails by bolding, or italicizing, or underlining, depending on who was doing the wordprocessing/design—de Groeve favoring bold, O’Quinn favoring italics, Cohen the underliner—all the urls that’d appeared since the previous edition.
All this for just $12, postage not included, or a 12 volume subscription, postage included (domestic only), for $100.
But then why pay for something available for nothing online?
Because of the incentives—“Why pay for something available for nothing online?” was a note Cohen wrote for the original edition, and his question was answered by the features that followed: coprographic site correspondence reprinted under the rubric “Dear Admin,” the swift merciless judgments of “Editorz Pickz ’N’ Prickz,” which de Groeve and O’Quinn issued under the collaborative cybernym “Dr. Oobleck Tourette OB/GYN,” a centerfold with interview column called “Femailer Daemon,” and the regular but vague and so never fulfilled promise fonted above each page in Helvetica: “all members get h&jobs.”
The backcover, initially, was an ad for The Clinger’s—whose management had not requested it and had no site to publicize and rejected a proposed trade for rent reduction—and folded behind it was a subscription envelope preaddressed but not prestamped to a PO box in Pacifica. Checks were accepted, but not creditcards: “If sending ca$h please fold discretely” [sic or not?]. [“Being in business meant reordering our lives: the file could be sent to the printer, but not via email [[then how?]]. The proofs had to be approved, and even that could only be accomplished in person. On distro days whoever rented the minivan, drove it, or so ‘Cull’ and ‘Qui’ insisted after they had an accident when whoever was not registered was driving[[?]]. We had to be at the printer in Oakland by 08:00, in order to load up the books—in our prime we were selling just over 2000 copies per volume—to get to Bay Stationery by 10:30, in order to pick up the packaging, to get to our unit by 11:00 or so to print out the labels and pack the books, to get to the Pacifica PO by 13:00, when it was relatively empty just after lunch. At the PO we would check the box, collect the checks and cash, stop at the Wells Fargo to deposit it all, and if we still had time stop for agave shakes and mock duck pockets at Bigestion. We had to be dropped off at our unit by 16:00 at the latest if our partners were to regas the van and have it back in its lot by 16:30 to avoid the night fee. ‘Qui’ and ‘Cull’ would then bicycle home. They were still living across from the The Irish Phoenix on Valencia.”]
[First quarter?] revenue was about $16—after the sunk costs sunk in, after Cohen paid his partners back for helping bail him out of utilities debt—before the threeway split. But by summer 1994, they were making enough to pay for the hiring of two employees, the daughters of Raffaella and Salvatore “Super Sal” [Trappezi/Trapezzi?], the bookkeeper and superintendent, respectively, of The Clinger’s. [“Salvatrice would have been about 20 then, and Heather about 16.] [[They would become employees #1 and #25 of Tetration, after Heather insisted on skipping the intermediary numerals in favor of 25, the number of Barry Bonds, the leftfield lefthanded slugger of the Giants, apparently, and so even today Tetration has 24 fewer employees than the personnel ops spreadsheets would indicate.”]]
Salvatrice, then 20, and Heather, 16, were paid $8/hour for data entry. Salvatrice would check the [email protected] email, verify “first level uniquity,” as a new site was called inhouse, or “second level uniquity,” as a new url was called inhouse, and copypaste to the DDbase appropriately. Heather, who was still a junior at Oceana High School, would report after school and relieve her sister. It was her job to update the dual subDDbases, crediting subscribers and prospectives with finds. The Trapezzi girls were diligent workers, and if they ever exasperated Cohen it was only because they failed to understand that the work they were doing could be done anywhere and at any time. Though the business’s first major purchases were two computers Cohen set up in the Trapezzis’ unit, Salvatrice persisted in arriving at Unit 26 at 09:00 promptly, and Heather in arriving at 17:00, on Mondays through Fridays [I AM TYPING OUT A SCHEDULE]. They couldn’t be persuaded to use anything other than the same mongrel workstation of Abs’s design [SUCK MY FUCKING BALLZZZ].
But neither Cohen nor de Groeve nor O’Quinn was content with being a publisher. Semesters came and went and gradschool was deferred. The Microsoft offers were off the table. With the Trapezzi girls now taking care of the business—entering data, updating the site and the emails, regularly checking for deadlinks, even taking over the print edition’s layout and negotiations with the printers, and then hiring employees #26–30, Heather’s classmates, to canvass the Bay soliciting subscribers—Cohen, de Groeve, and O’Quinn spent 1995 developing the algorithm.
This equation would become the foundation of Tetration. It was mapped out on paper by Cohen, and [coded] by his partners in two [programming] languages, Python and Java.
Its first iteration found application as an internal searchengine, which allowed the Trapezzis to find any link by name, category, domain, date listed, and user contributor.
Its second iteration was embedded in the site itself, though its appearance there was unfindable—it was not for external use. At this stage—mid-1995—the algorithm was set to track any link to Diatessaron, to follow it back to its origin page and determine whether it was listed or not. If not, the page would now be listed, and would be linked from Diatessaron, though none of this would happen automatically but rather required approval and manual inclusion, due to “a Biblical swarm of quashless bugs” that caused the algorithm to confuse incoming and outgoing urls of the same name but at [different domains], resulting in a failure to relate individual urls with their [hosting sites], “and that does not even take into account the equifails as like disk crash.”
This type of autosearch—in which an algorithm, conceived of as a “bot,” or “drone,” would “crawl,” or “creep,” “crustaceate,” or “spider”—required an increase in computing power, which, at the time, was expensive. July 1995, they took the site offline and sold their contributor elist [FOR HOW MUCH AND TO WHOM? I AM WRITING ABOUT A MAN WHO SOLD A LIST!!!!] to a new emarketing firm called Schlogistics, whose CEO, Randy Schloger, would marry Heather Trapezzi. With that income and the proceeds [HOW MUCH MONEY AGAIN? BECAUSE I MOTHERFUCKING CARE!!!!@#$%] from the last four editions of the Diatessaron, Cohen, de Groeve, and O’Quinn bought three Ultra Enterprises and three Intel Pentiums, both loaded [right word?] with Linux, which they racked [right word?] in the maintenance shed below Cohen’s unit. The Trapezzis refused to accept any rent for the shed [but weren’t they just the management, not ownership?], so Cohen drafted an agreement on the back of a Shell gas station receipt [though at which point did he or anyone else get a car?], giving the accommodating couple a 1% stake in whatever resulted, subsequently turning them into multimillionaires, which is why today “ ‘Super’ Sal Trapezzi” is still listed on Tetration’s About page, and even in SEC filings, as “Head Janitor 4 Life.”
Raffaella Trapezzi set about cleaning out the shed, and Super Sal, assisted by Salvatrice’s husband, insurance adjuster Ronnie Giudice (later the impresario behind Ronnie G’s Best Braciole,
which had ?number locations by ?date), constructed makeshift desks, bolting extra warped unit doors atop sawhorses. Following Cohen’s specifications they lightproofed the one window with flypaper, soundproofed the entirety by covering the walls with layers of bubblewrap atop vivisected eggcartons, and partitioned it in particleboard, with Cohen requesting that his own cubicle in the very center be boarded from floor to ceiling to create an enclosed shaft [how would he have gotten in and out?], though he was never to be found there [because there was no way to get in or out?], and preferred to work upstairs, in Unit 26, which he called “The Brumbellum,” “The Brain,” and later “The Fourth and a Half Estate,” and then “Getit D-Unit.”
By early 1996, they were set—they had everything but a name.
THIS IS JUST POINTLESS FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
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from the Palo Alto sessions: It was as like a dream. Or hallucination. As like when the comp digirecorder shuts off when its condenser mic does not detect our speaking voice for 1, 2, 3, 4 seconds and so the recording will become nothing but an artificially compressed memory omitting the time in which life is lived, the times of blankness between the redlit sesshs just lost and irretrievable. That is how we perceive that existence today, as like a vast unrecorded emptiness. We were not sleeping and not awake. We were convinced that we were writing everything wrong and had gotten everything uncombobulated, that we were writing the algy as like it were the businessplan, and writing the businessplan as like it were the algy. The algy a sequence of specific commands executing specific operations, the bplan a sequence of nonspecific goals and objectives or just subjective projections that would execute only if we failed to convince the VCs, or worse, if we succeeded at failing them totally. The algy used sequences of numbers to represent functions, the bplan used sequences of letters to represent the dysfunctionality of its intended readership, manipulating prospective investors according to sociocultural filters and career trajectories, levels of greed and their enabling inadequacies, significant degrees of gullibility too, or just plain unadulterated stupeyness.
We had set a full functionality deadline of September 1996 but we were behind schedule by April so we revised for December, but then it was May and we were behind the revised schedule. If stage 2 completion was unfeasible we would redefine and make that completion stage 1 so that everything was feasible. The aim was not to be workable. Not to be presentable. But to achieve seamless genius, no raphe. Only the rec investors say done is better than perfect. The techs say perfect is better than done. We were blessed, in that we had no rec investors and were the tech itself. We were always prodding, nudging one another subtle with our fists. Cull would say, “Cunts do not drip on deadline.” Qui would say, “It is too difficult to coordinate the squirts.” We talked as like this even with the girls around, and the girls were always around, The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters nerfing it up and tossing the frisbee indoors and the only way to get rid of them was to send them out on errands, or if they had a date. “No that is not the correct surge protector, and no we do not have exact change.” Qui and Cull asked all of them out and the answer was, “But you never change your pants.”
Never. We shared even the undies, just took what was folded atop the unit washer/dryer. We were all the same size back then. Fruit of the Loom was the best for extended sedation. No socks. Raffaella cooked but if she ever went aggro against our herbivorism and tried to convert us to sausage we sent The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters to forage. Cull and Qui both ordered Greek salads but Egyptian Fuel was a mile closer, though OrganoMex had faster response times despite being 2.2 miles farther away. Smoothies were the optimum delivery system but we were never quite satisfied with our formulas for determining whether the time it took for us to make them was more or less precious than the money it cost to order them and anyway Raffaella did not have a blender. Qui and Cull stopped driving back approx twice a week to San Francisco but still had to drive approx once a week to Stanford whenever our testsite would crash its servers and no one else could fix them or could apologize both so well and disingenuously. To make up the time Cull would ignore stopsigns and stoplights and Qui would ignore even the roads and once drove straight out of the parkinglot and through the condo quad and ruined the sprinkler system and so had to waste a weekend helping Super Sal and Ronnie G dig up the heads and replace them. We were so fritzed that once when we had to go to Stanford ourselves to tender our regrets for once again crashing their servers and to try and retrieve the latest corrupted version of their financial aid site, we forget because we were passed out whether it was Qui or Cull driving the car, but one of them was passed out with us and the other got lost in Monta Loma or Castro City and sleepdrove instead to the old apartment they shared in the Mission and even sleepwent to the door but the key he had did not work and the new tenants woke us up by giving us directions with a crowbar. For models of how best to present this period consult any national intelligence whitepaper on the behaviors of terrorist cells or besieged messianic cults.
Still, the hours were no longer than at any other startup. The hours were no longer than life. Cull and Qui would code and crash and then we would recode until crashing. We would work on it as like online would work on us, which meant perpetually. In the beginning it was a site, and then it was a program to be embedded in other sites, and then it was a program to be tabbed in a browser. But would we license it. Or sell it outright. Or just diversify it all as like our own company. Which would require which systems. Requiring funding of what amount and engineering by whom. Was search even patentable. How to recognize a question. The appropriate time to incorporate. How to recognize an answer. We had a title but no name. We were the founding architect of nothing.
We kept failing, our own computers kept crashing and kept crashing the servers at Stanford and then Stanford threatened to banish us from the servers but Qui and Cull appealed to Professor [?] Winhrad who intercessed and then we failed again and lost some of their admin and even some faculty email and then they threatened us again and Cull and Qui appealed again and Professor [?] Winhrad intercessed again and then they put us on probation, gave us a second chance squared, after which, hasta la vista, baby.
We had a problem but it was not us and yet neither were we the solution. Our problem was time and not because we did not have enough but because we had too much of space.
We had so much of this space and all of it kept growing but by the time we could crawl even a portion of it everything had grown again so that we could not have kept up even by walking or running. But that is not how to understand it.
If the internet is the hardware and the web is the software
If the net is the mind and the web is the body or the software the body and the hardware the mind
Think about it as like knots. Shoelaces. If you tie them but the knot is no good you can either tie another knot atop it or just undo it all and start over. But if you have never experienced a good knot in your life all you can do is do the both of them. Tie another knot and start over. Or think about it as like shaving your face. If you use a razor you might miss a hair or not cut it completely but if you use a tweezers and tweeze each hair you can bald your face to even the follicles. But then the rash. You cannot do both. Forget it. Or as like losing a wallet. You can retrace your steps or you can, forget it. Or as like losing a button. You can either retrace your steps and try and find it or you can just sew on a fresh one. But to do both you have to have two broken shirts or two broken pants and the needle, the thread. You have to realize the order. People wrapped themselves in skins that fell off them before they invented a needle and thread to sew them better before they invented a button device to clinch them better, and all the fits just worked. But imagine if everything was the reverse and you had to invent a clincher before inventing the equipment to sew an animal skin before even inventing the anima
l. That was search invented by how to search. Invented by how to tailor the results to the user. Not to mention that “button,” in another context, could refer not to a clothes clasp but to a key pressed to launch a weapon. Not to mention that in still other contexts “needle” could mean “annoy,” or “bother,” and “thread” might not be a literal string or twine but figurative as like a “drift” or “stream” whose speed is measured in “knots,” “a train of thought” just “flowing,” until it was “brought to heel.” The choice was to both needle the thread and thread the needle. Through its eye. In one ear, out the other. To know the polysemy of tongues. We had to code a searchengine to check our own code for a searchengine. That should tell you everything.
Or better, understand this by what we are, by what we have postulated as like our axiomatic expression. Separate, divide. Categories, classifications, types. Genus, species. Clades. It is history, it is historical. The world was discovered, the world was explored, and it was all so round and immense that it confused us. We reacted by formalizing ourselves into becoming botanists, zoologists, and so the plants and animals became formalized too, the botanists and zoologists arranged them. But they arranged them by how they looked, how they sounded, where they lived, when they lived, by character. How our humanity, taxonomized at the top of the pyramid or tree, perceived them. But then the universe that could not be seen and could not be heard was discovered and explored. Cells were observed. Mitochondria. Genes. DNA. It appeared that not all the animals and plants were as like they appeared. A whale was biologically closer to a panda than to a herring. Turtles were biologically different than tortoises but they both were closer to being ostriches than snakes.
Point is, what was important was not the organism itself but the connections among the organisms. The algy had to make the connections. We figgered if we could index all the tech links, and apply to each a rec link, whatever terminology we mortally employ, we could engineer the ultimate. The connection of connections.