Talk:MindVox/Archive

Whoever updated this article did a fantastic job; wonderful. I have done a little editing, mostly about the 2005 mindvox.com site. Sdedeo 23:23, 28 September 2005 (UTC) Also, I have started a peer review request -- I think we can maybe get this article to Featured status. Sdedeo 00:04, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Nice work with reformatting! I have made very minor edits, only pertaining to sentence structure and grammar, so it flows a little better in spots. MindVox is a fascinating topic, so much about it that sounds crazy is true and verifiable, while seemingly simple facts (when did it close?) are completely missing. What is here now does a good job of telling many different sides and remaining neutral. Most important I think it captures the spirit of what MindVox was and leaves the ending open-ended and easy to revise or add to, if more material or information becomes available.

I'm the one who uploaded the logo without putting up attribution, i've changed that. It's a logo, I don't think the article is flaming or derogatory to mindvox in anyway it's balanced and has gone through a lot of people editing it to reach the current state. Use of a logo is covered under fair use and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos posting the mindvox logo as a balance to the original text logo in the articles' opening, is covered under both of the previous links within wikipedia. 6Akira7 21:31, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Panix vs. MindVox Start Date
Slashdot people aside, it is indeed the case that Panix was online in NYC well before MindVox was. Being generous, MindVox was online by March 1992 (although not open to paying customers until a bit later.) Just going to google groups, you can see that Panix users had posted over 5000 messages to USENET by that time. Sdedeo 23:37, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

WRT Panix, I think it's a good compromise and presentation of the facts. AFAIK from old threads on netcom with Bob Rieger, panix was a Apple Mac with AUX in the beginning. It used uucp for news and mail, it was not "live" on the net before 1992 and you could not telnet into anything called "panix.com" until months after "phantom.com" was accessible. MindVox was "live" on the net using a NeXT, before panix, panix was providing internet services before MindVox. Both companies switched to Suns in 1992. This is the best of my recollection of Bob Rieger's listing, whatever the case is, mindvox and panix are both within the first 5 internet service providers in the US, not just NY. The other two were netcom and Barry Shein's software tool and die, I don't recall the 5th off hand and considering it's a mindvox entry, it doesn't really matter. If we ever do a first 10 ISP list for Wiki, then we should do some more research :-)

Sorry if I've made a mess in the comments, I'm not sure how to sign here or how it works, I've only participated in anon edits so far when I know the subject matter and am interested enough to take the time to write something. I need to make an account and read the discussion FAQ :-)


 * Hee hee, yes, it does seem pretty tangled. I think, given both my research and your comments, yes, Panix was the first "commerical Internet Service Provider", although Mindvox may well have had port 20, among other things, open before Panix.


 * You seem to have some inside info on MindVox! I was just a user back in the day, working from memory and google. If you have any more info, or (most needed) references (see below) please continue! (You can sign your remarks on the talk page with four ~s, btw) Sdedeo 22:17, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Sources Needed
Hello all. We need some more sources for this article. In particular, three important things are needed:


 * Sources for the Kroupa "listed missing, presumed dead." Sounds a little fishy to me.
 * Sources (including any actual messages) to confirm that "additional material suggests MindVox was never fully "closed" but simply closed to the public and became a private, invitation-only system, with reprints of messages posted in 1998 and 1999 being re-posted to various mailing lists." If this is really the case, there should be some stuff online somewhere, but I wouldn't know where to look.
 * Sources to confirm that "Robert Maplethorpe, Douglas Rushkoff, John Perry Barlow, and Kurt Cobain" were MindVox users (or at least had accounts and once or twice used them.) I don't know where this came from, presumably a news article at the time?

Sdedeo 18:53, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Barlow and Rushkoff were both regulars on MindVox. Wil Wheaton was more than a regular and one of the "Voxers" (peeps who spent hours a day sitting on MindVox), who ended up meeting his girlfriend through the VoxMeats. Wil has written about all that himself somewhere in his endless blog. Barlow, Kroupa and Fancher were also the entire "cyberspace" panel at the CMJ New Music Conference in 1993. Billy Idol you'll notice is carefully not mentioned anywhere in MindVox's own PR ;-), but Idol was also regularly on MindVox and in fact placed parts of it into that companion disk on his "Cyberpunk" CD.

The line "Doug Rushkoff (not Douglas in the article) John Perry Barlow and Kurt Cobain" came from a Details magazine article from 1995 written by contributing editor John Leland. Cobain was on MindVox during 1993, possibly more to find local drug dealers when he was staying in NYC than to read the conferences, but he was a presence. Further, John Leland had his first book published a few months ago, called "Hip the History of Cool", where he kicks off the entire Cyberspace chapter with quotes from Kroupa, compares him to Jesse James and puts Cobain and Kroupa up as representing Generation X. This is recent, not ancient history, the paperback of his book just came out and he's quoting personal interviews with Kroupa dated 2003 and 2004. It also isn't new, Leland is now a staff writer at the NY Times who has put Kroupa into counter-culture stories on a regular basis during the 2000's.

All that is verifiable and makes a certain kind of sense, the only thing that is from out of left field is Robert Maplethorpe? I don't know who put that in there, or where the original line came from, but Maplethorpe's name was not in the Details article. The list of celebs, almost-celebs, notorious users, who were on MindVox would be 10 or 20 pages long, but I really do not think robert Maplethorpe was one of them, members of his estate or owners of his work may have been on Mindvox, but not Robert himself. Unless anyone can think of one instance in the media where Robert is mentioned in connection with mindvox, or show at least one message, I've gone ahead and removed his name. Maybe the author was thinking of Robert Altman, who was on Mindvox, photographed Kroupa in 2003 or 2004 and was part of the same Yippie Speaking Tour, Kroupa was on with Hunter S. Thompson, Grace Slick and assorted drug dealers (activists: Dennis Peron, Ed Rosenthal, Dana Beal, etc), Altman was also at the Knitting Factory with Kroupa on Christmas of 2003, this was listed in the NY Times, other newspapers and is online somewhere I'm sure.

http://yippie.mindvox.com

LOL I think MindVox is the reverse of the rest of the world, the crazier it sounds the more true it usually is, while the simple facts of nearly any situation or event are absent. Kroupa was listed as a missing person in 1997, Fancher in fact posed this all over MindVox. I think this was for legal reasons, because there was some truck load of legal paperwork and subpoenas that were supposed to be delivered to Kroupa, but nobody could find him, including his partner ;-). At the time Kroupa would have been somewhere in Belize, Mexico or Thailand, not NYC. They make jokes about this themselves in the resurrection piece on mindvox:

http://www.mindvox.com/staticpage/Sacred/Resurrection.html

Search under "What did you do to Patrick?" "Where is Patrick," "You Killed Patrick!"

There are lot of hacker underground types who drift through the Mindvox lists, this same topic is covered again in one of the messages as well as a repost of one of Kroupa's messages dated 1998. Added together there are something like half a million messages in the Mindvox lists since 2000, including at least a few hundred in crashtestdummies where the entire MindVox system rises back up and opens using their WebObjects web front end.

-

Wow, this is wild. Great job, I would never have believed this. Sdedeo 18:34, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Heh, I don't actually have much "inside" knowledge other than having been a user in the 90's and signed up to the Mindvox lists since 2001 or so, the lists are very much alive and have a lot of traffic, nearly everything I've mentioned has flown through them at one time or another in the past 5 years. To completely cover mindvox would probably take 50 pages and I have this feeling we can go catch MindVox the movie in another 10 years ;-) Along with patrick kroupa the biography, which will either be a trilogy or one 2,000 page long book ;-) MindVox IS fascinating, why else are all of us sitting here gathering this info? ;-)

Here's one funny message that doesn't really belong anywhere in the Mindvox entry itself, but is still really funny. Mindvox vs. Panix seems to have been a real issue, at least for Alexis Rosen the owner of Panix who looks like he really hated Mindvox. Maybe with good reason ;-)

Footnoting
Hey -- I just removed some footnotes from the text; the main reason to use the inline citations like this is to directly reference something that establishes a fact; generally, links that just further describe something (e.g., the NeXT links) should be omitted (or if they're really useful, be put in the NeXT article itself.) All the best! Sdedeo 00:01, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry! that was my fault, got a little carried away adding NeXT references to what the two or three of you doing most of the writing have put in. Amazing article, adds a lot of depth and info to the myths. 6Akira7 20:08, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I added one example screen I found of old MindVox material, the Fling command. I'm not sure what the best way to format this is, if anyone knows better please give it a shot and change the bottom descriptor part. 6Akira7 01:25, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Voxers-at-Large
There was also the group called VAL (Voxers-at-Large) and the talk of lifting the entire content of the Waffle and saving it somewhere safe. We spent years on Vox and we wrote and poured our souls onto digitally arranged dotted screen. Once in a while, I miss that.

Reverted last edit, the article doesn't contribute anything to MindVox entry. Not-notable, poorly written, list of names with links to home pages(?) Not appropriate for encyclopedia entry. Whatever VAL was it doesn't seem to exist anymore and it's unlikely the stated goal of reprinting copyrighted material from Mindvox would have been legally viable at the time. If you read the Mindvox entry, it appears that in addition to releasing some material to Textfiles.com, their database is intact and the owners have cooperated with educational institutions and allowed them to view the entire content within the last 3 years (Kroupa on Agrippa, cooperating with Kirschenbaum and English Department of UCSB).

TrancedOut 14:01, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I added the category MindVox. If there is a better way of doing the infobox or setting it up, please give some input Myles!

I read the Voxxers entry just now, I'm not sure the problem of the entry is what they wanted to do was legal or not, i'm sure whoever could have reposted their own messages wherever they wanted without having the rights to the rest of mindvox. To my understanding the owners of MindVox back then and right now, are the same, Kroupa and Fancher. When they sold "mindvox" they didn't sell "mindvox" (meaning the system itself, their domains, all intellectual property pertaining to it), they sold the users of their isp to another company. Whether what Voxxers wanted to do was legal or not isn't the point. I think the point is, whatever their intent was, what they actually did was nothing. There was no Mindvox rebirth or prescence prior to Kroupa/Fancher putting it back online in 2000.

The Voxxers entry right now is awful, a list of non notable people and home pages. If it isn't deleted, it would be reasonable to replace it with a few paragraphs, but i'm not sure what they'd say. The current inhabitants of the MindVox lists call themselves "Voxxers" although there seem to be very few of the original people left. Maybe ask then to give you a web page where old users could keep in touch?

If you check both the slashdot and spymac entries, they also faced similar issues within Wiki. At the end of the edits and deletes, nearly all users, admins, moderators, were de-listed as non notable. Only the main slashdot admins survived in their entry. In spymac they deleted all individuals and kept only the spymac entry, because none of them was notable as a individual, only as "spymac" the whole. Most of the prominent former users of mindvox already seem to have their own entries, the one exception being "Tom Higgins" who also has a short entry related to MindVox. 6Akira7 17:22, 12 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Which infobox are you talking about? I'm confused.  I'd be happy to help, and I'm sure what you're asking for is obvious, but I'm missing it.  --Myles Long 14:45, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi Myles, sorry, what I actually meant was how to do Category the RIGHT WAY ;-). Thanks for fixing the MindVox cat and making it a little better, my question was how to make it collect the images from the different articles, you have a really nice one for CULT OF THE DEAD COW, if there is code to do this, I haven't found it yet. I put in a MindVox info box after looking at what peeps have done with other systems and made it similar and slightly different, which is what slashdot, myspace, etc, entries are like, so I hope it is ok with wikipedia guidelines, this is the first info box I've made. I didn't turn it into a template because reading through Kroupa's page, it really doesn't belong there since 3/4 of what is in there is him seperate from MindVox. If it sucks or doesn't conform to how its supposed to look, sorry, my bad, I'm the same idiot who capitalized the "H" in LOD Hacking and you had to put in effort to move it to lowercase. If the Voxxer entry is fixed or changed around instead of deleted, I will turn it into a template so it can be tagged onto appropriate MindVox related articles. 6Akira7 17:32, 14 June 2006 (UTC)