I Remember Cult of the Dead Cow

I can remember back in 92 or so when I discovered the Cult. They were definitely cool, and surely punk. I was just around that time getting more interested in the lo-fi of UNIX, but not deeply. (Damn you Xerox!)

 

Here's the odd thing. I was working in Cambridge and starting to do that kind of hacking thing, but I chose to go Mac and multimedia instead of building a minix box. I was already at panix.com and was also at the Well, so even though I appreciated the lo-fi, I never expected anything from the punks. Still, cDc had cool stuff.

 

So one night I'm surfing and some dude wants to talk to me. I give him my work phone number. He's asking me all kinds of questions about this underworld. Especially 'zines', but he pronounces it with a long i, like it rhymes with 'pines'. His story is that his son has started getting into punk zines and ran away from home and now he's desperately trying to figure out this BBS underworld. I generally assumed that he was FBI and trolling me to reveal something. I wasn't so into the scene that I could be of any help, but he could have been legit.

 

The coolest domain in the world at the time, next to panix.com and well.com was world.std.com. Software Tool and Die. cDc was right up there. Oh shit I almost forgot L0pht. L0pht Heavy Industries. I definitely wanted to join L0pht. It sparks joy as I think about it now. I can't tell you how close I got to moving over to that dark side. Wow.

 

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As much time as I spent in virtual worlds, for me it was always about the premises of augmentation as defined by the PARC dudes. I never really bought into the soul of the new machine, and I guess I was in the game far too soon, but that's a long story. I liked being in the streets as an arcade gamer. So yeah finding cheats online for Virtua Fighter was a coup, but doing stuff online - well I already had the Internet Hunt and the goings on at Well. The internet as a playground for punks wasn't appealing. See I can remember the UNIX wars and I wanted, more than anything else, to reap the whirlwind of the Xerox promise that Apple was maybe sorta just kind of approaching. Except of course that Apple didn't understand data at all. I was still thinking that I might get to be a rocket scientist on Wall Street.  I might have also, now that I think about it, ended up at Peoplesoft which was also over Cambridgeside, but meh. It felt a little granola crunchy for my tastes. So yeah, it was my material ambition that prevented me from doing the punk thing. Well, more my curation of self, and how I expected to live.