context
The work on this site was written in a world that has mostly vanished: online conferences reached by telnet, run on conferencing software, kept by hosts, inside companies and programs whose names now need explaining. These pages are the explanation — the wrapper around the work, as the index, the glossary, and the faq are its reference shelf. Every entry lists the sources it consulted; where the record is thin, or the editor’s memory is the source, the entry says so. Where the sister edition at scibe.org treats the same ground, the entries cross-link. The editor’s thesis for the layer, in his words: “Like any museum, the art is only part of what makes Item 8 and Scibe interesting.” Provenance, people, and machinery are part of the exhibit here, not footnotes to it.
The sources those entries consulted — and every other source this edition stands on — are gathered in one place: the bibliography, where each entry names what it establishes and the pages that cite it.
the entries
online conferencing — the doorway: what the medium was and is, and why its rhythm is in every line of the work.
The Meta Network — tmn.com: the network that housed item 8, its conferences, its hosts, its founder.
Caucus — the software underneath: Charles Roth, Screen Porch, and the legacy of the item/response grammar.
MDN — the company the editor names behind the network, and the documented company standing beside the name.
ARTS WIRE — artists online before the web: the NYFA program that was the sister work’s home.
The WELL — the other ancestor: conferencing as culture, and the kinship question, answered three ways.
the village — the hosts and keepers: founders, makers, sysadmins, and the people who tended the rooms.
from telnet to the web — how the rooms were reached: dial-up, telnet, hourly meters, and the browser that changed the threshold.
consulted sources
The sister edition’s wiki — the companion context layer for My Name is Scibe
Wikipedia, “CONFER (software)”
Charles Roth, interviewed by Lisa Kimball (2004), caucuscare.com