MDN
The editor names the company behind The Meta Network as MDN. He gives the identification from inside the building: in 1994 he worked at PNI — Picture Network International, Ltd. — at 2000 North 15th Street in Arlington, Virginia, in the same building as the company’s offices, and he remembers its ground floor, its server room at the back, and Frank Burns’ son Scott at the machines. His name for the company comes from having been in its rooms. In its rooms, but not of them: PNI had no connection of any kind with TMN or its company — the link was the shared building, and the front-entrance patio where the smokers of both offices gathered; by his own account he might have known that world only because of a smoking habit. Nor was he a customer: in those years his own Internet provider was ClarkNet, and MDN was never his ISP — what he had was the building, the patio, and a smoker’s knowledge of the world next door. His professional profile is the documentary anchor for that employment: it dates the PNI work June 1993 to October 1994 — beginning weeks after his May 1993 graduation from George Washington University — in technical customer support for the Seymour platform.
The published record, standing beside his name for it and not reconciled with it, knows the company as Metasystems Design Group — MDG. It is MDG that InfoWorld named on November 4, 1991: “known for its Caucus conferencing software for PC and minicomputer,” with Frank Burns as its president, speaking for “true computer conferencing, such as subject matter indexing.” It is MDG that Howard Rheingold places Burns in as a partner. It is MDG whose principals joined Screen Porch’s founding team in 1996, and MDG whose address the period directories print — 2000 North 15th Street, Suite 103, Arlington, in the later listings; 1401 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 601, in an earlier one.
One period account gives the company a second full name — and the campus that lived on its systems used that name’s short form every day. Virginia “Ginny” Little — the EFA teacher whose classroom conferences neighboured this work’s home — published her own account of the Creative Writers on the Net program in 1997, and in it she names the company that housed the program: “We ‘connected’ through a computer server company, Metasystems Design Network (Metanet) at the cost of $100 per year per student. The company provided technical support, on-site training during orientation, and conferencing software to ‘house’ our private campus.” The November 1999 export of the campus conferences — the surviving capture, taken through the session of Phillip J. Rhoades, an EFA student, whose login its conference pages render under, and preserved in the editor’s archive — runs on the same name: “Metanet” stands there over a hundred times, in many voices — Metanet’s offices, Metanet’s fees, “the metanet folks” — and when the company changed hands it is the name Ginny Little reaches for: “I am negotiating with metanet now. It has become Caucus systems and they are only doing corporate events now” (September 22, 1999). The documentary record therefore carries both stylings: Design Group in the directories, the trade press, and the company’s own 1983 announcement; Design Network — Metanet — in the published account, and the daily usage, of the world the company housed. Metanet is the bridge: the working name in the company’s own rooms, standing between the formal record and the editor’s initials. Shown Little’s text and the scrape’s usage, the editor affirms the identification outright: “Yes. Metanet. The Meta Network is tmn.com.”
This entry prints both, because the edition prints what it can stand behind: MDN is the company the editor names, on his ruling and his memory; MDG is the company the documents name. His initials no longer stand unattested against the record: MDN matches the initials of the Network styling exactly — though no source consulted itself prints the initials “MDN.” What remains open is narrower than it was: whether those initials were ever themselves printed as the company’s short form, and how the formal styling and the working name divided their occasions. The question is left open here, deliberately — the editor will settle it, and this entry will change when he does. (One nearby name is not this one: “MDN” in this work’s own index is Michelle Diane Nolan, a writer, named by her initials in the text — a different MDN entirely.)
consulted sources
InfoWorld, November 4, 1991, p. 36 — MDG and its Caucus software, Burns its president
The November 1999 export of the TMN campus conferences — taken through Phillip J. Rhoades’ session, whose login the export renders under; preserved in the editor’s archive — “Metanet” as the company’s everyday name in over a hundred uses; Ginny Little, September 22, 1999, on its becoming Caucus Systems
Wikipedia, “Frank L. Burns” — president of Metasystems Design Group
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (rev. ed. 2000), p. 286 — “another partner in MDG, Frank Burns”
Screen Porch backgrounder (1998), caucuscare.com archive — MDG, its principals, and The Meta Network
The editor’s memorial page for Frank Burns — his own pairing of TMN and MDG
The sister edition’s wiki: Metasystems Design Group
The editor’s professional profile — the PNI dates and role, as he publishes them
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