“software is the final victory”: Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (New York: Picador, 2001), 307.
“Another caver who was with”: Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave.”
“harrowing of Hell”: Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (New York: Back Bay Books, 1981), 88.
By the time she encountered: www.legacy.com/obituaries/dispatch/obituary.aspx?n=john-preston-wilcox&pid=145049233.
“completely different from the real cave”: Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave.”
“Adventure’s Colossal Cave, at least”: Walt Bilofsky, “Adventures in Computing,” Profiles: The Magazine for Kaypro Users 2, no. 1 (1984): 25, https://archive.org/stream/PROFILES_Volume_2_Number_1_1984-07_Kaypro_Corp_US/PROFILES_Volume_2_Number_1_1984-07_Kaypro_Corp_US_djvu.txt.
“the deep recesses you explored”: Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 25th Anniversary Edition (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010), 113.
His daughters were told to use it: Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave.”
“analogous to the democratization of reading”: Mary Ann Buckles, “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’” (PhD thesis, University of California, San Diego, 1985).
“a mythological urtext”: Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 108.
By 1984, the number of women: Thomas J. Misa, “Gender Codes: Defining the Problem,” in Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing, ed. Thomas J. Misa (Hoboken: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010), 3.
“If she can only cook”: “Bytes for Bites: The Kitchen Computer,” Computer History Museum, www.computerhistory.org/revolution/minicomputers/11/362.
“more authority, power, and intelligence”: Jesse Adams Stein, “Domesticity, Gender, and the 1977 Apple II Personal Computer,” Design and Culture 3, no. 2 (2011): 193–216.
CHAPTER SEVEN: RESOURCE ONE
“pueblo in the city”: Charles Raisch, “Pueblo in the City: Computer Freaks, Architects and Visionaries Turn a Vacant San Francisco Candy Factory into a Technological Commune,” Mother Jones, May 1976, accessed February 5, 2017, https://books.google.com/books?id=aOYDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA27&dq=mother%20jones%20pueblo%20in%20the%20city%20charles%20raisch&pg=PA28#v=onepage&q&f=true.
“big noodles” of industrial power: Lee Felsenstein, interview with the author, March 7, 2017.
“The school was on strike”: Pamela Hardt-English, interview with the author, February 6, 2017.
“It was the first time many of them”: Optic Nerve, “Project One,” 1972, Pacific Film Archive Film and Video Collection, https://archive.org/details/cbpf_000052.
“Our vision was making technology accessible: Hardt-English, interview with the author, February 6, 2017.
“My brother came to live with me”: Ibid.
“one of the great hustles of modern times”: Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.
“She had this way of sort of screwing up”: Felsenstein, interview with the author, March 7, 2017.
“Pamela was about the only person”: Jane R. Speiser, Roadmap of the Promised Land (Turin: Edizioni Angolo Manzoni, 2006), 45.
“If people needed something”: Hardt-English, interview with the author, February 6, 2017.
“half or more of computer science is heads”: Stewart Brand, II Cybernetic Frontiers (New York: Random House, 1974), 49–50.
“magnificent men with their flying machines”: Ibid., 50.
totems of a “regimented order”: Lee Felsenstein, “Community Memory: The First Public-Access Social Media System,” in Social Media Archaeology and Poetics, ed. Judy Malloy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 91.
“We opened the door to cyberspace”: Ibid., 89.
as a “living metaphor”: Levy, Hackers, 128.
“When I was at Project One”: Hardt-English, interview with the author, February 20, 2017.
“Pam found herself unwittingly”: Felsenstein, e-mail message to the author, April 9, 2017.
“The closest thing to a governing agency”: Sherry Reson, interview with the author, February 20, 2017.
“Hippies with their old ladies”: Chris Macie, interview with the author, February 20, 2017.
“We wanted the social workers”: Reson, interview with the author, February 20, 2017.
“They figured out a way to put technology”: Joan Lefkowitz, interview with the author, March 6, 2017.
“women didn’t do the programming”: Ibid.
“You’re countering dominance behavior”: Reson, interview with the author, February 20, 2017.
CHAPTER EIGHT: NETWORKS
“a scientist who needed”: Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 1.
“looking kind of like unmade beds”: Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, “Oral History of Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler: Interviewed by Marc Weber,” September 10, 2009, Computer History Museum, 4, www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories.
While doing graduate work: Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler, “Interview by Janet Abbate,” IEEE History Center, July 8, 2002, http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Elizabeth_%22Jake%22_Feinler.
Realizing she was more interested: Ibid.
“Mother of all Demos”: It also ran on an SDS-940—and according to some accounts, the very same machine that eventually made its way to Resource One.
“He would come down and say”: Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
The connection crashed halfway through: Leonard Kleinrock, “An Early History of the Internet [History of Communications],” IEEE Communications Magazine 48, no. 8 (August 2010).
“I said, ‘What’s a Resource Handbook?’”: Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
“It was pretty obvious”: Ibid.
“the kids ran the machine”: Ibid.
Despite these challenges, the Resource Handbook: Garth O. Bruen, WHOIS Running the Internet: Protocol, Policy, and Privacy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016), 27.
Ellen Westheimer, who worked at Bolt: Elizabeth Feinler, “Host Tables, Top-Level Domain Names, and the Origin of Dot Com,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 3 (March 2011), http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=5986499.
“There weren’t many women who were programmers”: Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
“somebody came and yelled at me”: Ibid.
“It was harder to get higher-ups”: Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, interview by Marc Weber, 14.
“If you didn’t know where else to go”: Ibid.
“It was just unending”: Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
“but don’t touch mine”: Ibid.
At a certain point, she began to remove her own name: Ibid.
“That was almost from the beginning”: Ibid.
“We were just trying to build things”: Ibid.
“There was a couch in there”: Feinler, interview by Weber, 9.
“I always meant to get married”: Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
“The Internet was more fun than a barrel of monkeys”: Internet Society, “Elizabeth Feinler—INTERNET HALL OF FAME PIONEER,” 4:40, filmed April 23, 2012, posted to YouTube May 8, 2012, https://youtu.be/idb-7Z3qk_o.
“She wanted to have a crab feast”: Mary K. Stahl, interview with the author, September 7, 2017.
“It was like my family”: Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
“a kid hacker would be talking”: Feinler, interview by Weber, 19.
“WHOIS was probably one of our biggest servers”: Ibid., 26.
WHOIS does nothing less: Bruen,
WHOIS Running the Internet, 7.
“a burn-out job”: Stahl, interview with the author, September 7, 2017.
“cumbersome and inefficient”: Feinler, “Host Tables.”
Jake suggested dividing them into generic categories: Ibid.
“I think there was a lot of bad feeling”: Stahl, interview with the author, September 7, 2017.
“The main purpose of the Internet”: Feinler, interview with the author, September 1, 2017.
“coming up with the best suite of protocols”: Ibid.
“Gee, that person looks out of place”: Rebecca J. Rosen, “Radia Perlman: Don’t Call Me the Mother of the Internet,” The Atlantic, March 3, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-perlman-dont-call-me-the-mother-of-the-internet/284146.
“She was busy freeing the johns”: Feinler, interview by Marc Weber, 28.
“The more senior you get”: Radia Perlman, interview with the author, June 22, 2017.
“I never took anything apart”: Ibid.
“Certainly, people like that”: Ibid.
“He said, ‘Are you happy professionally?’”: Ibid.
“I always had the world’s worst cold”: Ibid.
“by issuing a memo saying”: Ibid.
“stepping outside of the complexity”: Ibid.
“I try to design things”: Ibid.
“invent a magic box”: Imagining the Internet, “Internet Hall of Fame 2014: Radia Perlman,” 16:48, filmed April 7, 2014, posted to YouTube April 15, 2014, https://youtu.be/G3zJuMht5Kk.
“He thought that was going to be hard”: Perlman, interview with the author, June 22, 2017.
“I realized, oh wow—it’s trivial”: Ibid.
“Without me, if you just blew”: Imagining the Internet, “Internet Hall of Fame 2014: Radia Perlman,” 16:48, filmed April 7, 2014, posted to YouTube April 15, 2014, https://youtu.be/G3zJuMht5Kk.
“She said, ‘Certainly,’ and she quoted”: Perlman, interview with the author, June 22, 2017.
From this, Radia adapted her spanning-tree algorithm: Radia Perlman, Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2000), 58.
“If I do my job right”: Perlman, interview with the author, June 22, 2017.
CHAPTER NINE: COMMUNITIES
“I learned to drive”: Reyner Banham, The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 5.
“rather like taking a tank”: Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 2.
Rather, this next generation: That convenience was no accident. The two men who wrote the original BBS software in 1978 did so because their Chicago microcomputer club wanted to share newsletters, even during harsh midwestern snowstorms.
“touched her core”: Madeline Gonzales Allen, “Community Networking, an Evolution,” in Social Media Archaeology and Poetics, 291.
In a five-part documentary: Jason Scott, BBS: The Documentary, https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary.
“Van Halen rules”: Ibid.
“first realization that there were people”: “First Memories: Aliza Sherman,” Women’s Internet History Project, last modified March 26, 2015, http://womensinternethistory.org/2015/03/first-memories-aliza-sherman.
“All software does is manage symbols: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Software Catalog (New York: Quantum Press/Doubleday, 1984), 4.
“wanted to have an experiment”: Nancy Rhine, interview with the author, February 8, 2017.
“it was like somebody had literally”: Naomi Pearce, interview with the author, February 16, 2017.
Or, as The WELLbeings say: Cliff Figalo, “The WELL: A Regionally Based On-Line Community on the Internet,” in Public Access to the Internet, eds. Brian Kahin and James Keller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 55.
“The WELL stood for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link”: Rhine, interview with the author, February 8, 2017.
journalists, ex-hippies, and hobbyist: Encyclopedia of New Media, ed. Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference Publications, 2003), 481.
“I can’t send beams”: Horn, Cyberville, 72.
“It wasn’t like I was a visionary”: Stacy Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“people just openly made fun”: Ibid.
“to do something which sounded”: Ibid.
Go away, they’d scream at the phone: Horn, Cyberville, 44.
“like Cracker Jacks”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“deserted, empty, time tripping”: Horn, Cyberville, 44.
“Clinton and Gore were”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“people started having this sense”: Ibid.
“When computer people came online”: Casey Kait and Stephen Weiss, Digital Hustlers: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 56.
“There was a contingent of people”: Marisa Bowe, interview with the author, July 26, 2016.
“punk rock suburbanite-city girl”: Horn, Cyberville, 147.
“Sometimes newcomers don’t realize”: Marisa Bowe, “Net Living: The East Coast Hang Out,” Wired, March 1, 1993, www.wired.com/1993/03/net-living-the-east-coast-hang-out.
“I hate myself for being a fucking addict”: Horn, Cyberville, 76.
“My success was due in part”: Stacy Horn, “Echo,” in Social Media Archaeology and Poetics, 246.
“We would have these meetings”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“She was a master at it”: Ibid.
“This is Stacy Horn”: Aliza Sherman, interview with the author, June 2, 2016.
“In those days,” Stacy writes: Horn, Cyberville, 92.
“I talk differently when I’m with my choir friends”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“WIT with a leather jacket”: Horn, Cyberville, 246.
“Shades of separate but equal”: Ibid., 87.
“Back then it was just so odd”: “First Memories: Aliza Sherman.”
a long list of gender options: The popular MUD LambdaMOO offered eleven genders. A character could be male or female, but it could also be plural, appearing as a kind of colony, or ego, for which the only pronoun is “I,” or else royal, using only the royal “we.” The neutral genders had their own pronoun conventions: “splat” relied on asterisks, while a “spivak” character was referred to as “e,” “em,” “eir,” “emself.”
“interested in seeing how the other half lives”: Pavel Curtis, “Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities,” https://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/curtis_mudding.article.
“On the nets”: Allucquére Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 84.
“I didn’t know what to do”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“the George Wallace of cyberspace”: Horn, Cyberville, 87.
“Cyberspace makes it easier”: Ibid., 102.
“All right, she begins”: Stacy Horn, e-mail message to the author, February 26, 2016.
“There were laundromats, delis”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
“It was this weird thing”: Ibid.
83 percent of Echoids: Echo NYC About Page, December 1998, https://web.archive.org/web/19990508065020/http://www.echonyc.com/about.
“the bedrock of Silicon Alley”: Jason Cherkovas, “New York’s New Media Ground Zero,” in Silicon Alley: The Rise and Fall of a New Media District, ed. Michael Indergaard (New York: Routledge, 2004), 32.
A group of Echoids got together: Howard Mittelmark, interview with the author, July 21, 2016.
“The strongest virtual communities”: Horn,
Cyberville, 113.
“Stacy was more of an autocrat”: Mittelmark, interview with the author, July 21, 2016.
“he was, like, really subversive”: Bowe, interview with the author, July 26, 2016.
“When the world that you’re in”: Ibid.
“Echo is Echo because of the hosts”: Horn, Cyberville, 39.
“animateurs” culled from: Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 235.
“Hosts are the people”: Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 26.
“front page of the Internet”: Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation.
“cyberaffirmative action”: Horn, Cyberville, 96.
“I heard women talking”: Mittelmark, interview with the author, July 21, 2016.
“A PLANE JUST CRASHED”: Horn, “Echo,” 245.
“The hottest topic”: Horn, Cyberville, 53.
“Someone in the twenty-second century”: Horn, interview with the author, May 26, 2016.
CHAPTER TEN: HYPERTEXT
Sprawling, self-referential novels: Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 24.
“This web of time”: Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 100.
“Every cow, every sheep”: Dame Wendy Hall, interview with the author, January 18, 2017.
“like those of the Last Judgement”: Richard FitzNeal (Richard Fitz Nigel), Dialogus de Scaccario, the Course of the Exchequer, and Constitutio Domus Regis, the King’s Household, ed. and trans. Charles Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 64.
“that’s the British Broadcasting Corporation”: Hall, interview with the author, January 18, 2017.
Robot limbs will be used: “1986: A Child’s View of the Future,” Domesday Reloaded, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/GB-424000-534000/page/16.
“The ideas were stunning”: Hall, interview with the author, January 18, 2017.
“shy and retiring student”: Web Science Trust, “Professor Wendy Hall: Making Links,” 50:28, filmed July 14, 1997, posted to YouTube March 12, 2017, https://youtu.be/cFa3e-VkgMk.
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