The Meta Network
The Meta Network — TMN, at tmn.com — opened on March 28, 1983, founded by Frank Burns, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who had directed the Army’s Task Force Delta, an interdisciplinary, computer-linked network of researchers and futurists. The founding press release announced the ambition in Burns’ words: “In a real sense, we are building an information age version of the think tank. We are building a network of networks that is focused on the discovery of knowledge rather than just the exchange of information.” TMN describes itself, in the phrase its histories keep, as “dedicated to learning and creative freedom.”
It ran on Caucus (see Caucus), and its life was organized as Caucus organizes life: conferences on subjects, topics — items — inside them, responses inside those. Public conferences stood open to every member; private ones were restricted by their hosts. The artist conference was one of the public rooms, and item 8 of artist — opened September 2, 1997 by a writer of Scibe, to recreate Scibe, and closed a year later — is the work this edition preserves. In the mid-1990s the network’s web address, tmn.com, also carried the web pages of ARTS WIRE (see ARTS WIRE): the sister work to this edition, My Name is Scibe, links in its own text to addresses under tmn.com that no longer answer.
names, hosts, organizers
TMN required registration under real names. A member could set a profile pseudonym, but the login name — and the path back to the person — remained; the network’s own account of itself is blunt: “TMN members are not anonymous.” Conferences were tended by hosts, who guided conversation and could enforce the room’s rules; all hosts were selected by TMN’s moderators, and above the hosts stood the conference organizers, a core of unpaid members with wider powers, who chose the featured conference hosts and could, rarely, close an account for abuse. It was a governed commons, and the governing was done by people — see the village.
the company, and the rooms it kept
The network’s operator in the published record is Metasystems Design Group — MDG — of Arlington, Virginia (see MDN, the name the editor gives the company, and the open question between the two names). Period listings give MDG at 2000 North 15th Street, Suite 103, Arlington, VA 22201, telephone 703-243-6622, reachable by telnet at tmn.com; an earlier listing places it at 1401 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 601, Arlington. The editor’s Scibe-era address, printed in that work in 1994, was 2000 North 15th Street, Suite 107 — four doors from Suite 103; what that adjacency was, and what it was not, is told in full in the MDN entry. In 1985 TMN was one of the consortium of online communities that formed the Electronic Networking Association — founded, the record shows, by Lisa Kimball, herself a partner in MDG from 1984.
The editor’s recollection of those offices, offered as recollection: the company occupied the ground floor; the servers — for the ISP side of the business and for the Caucus conferences — lived in a server room at the back of the offices, where a storage closet would ordinarily be, tended by Frank Burns’ son Scott Burns, the system administrator of everything, who lived on site. The editor also remembers the rooms holding the previous computing era in living memory — mainframe time and thermal printers were “way pre-me,” in his words; what he saw in 1994 was that era’s remnants and its stories, in the rooms where the newer network ran.
the WELL question
Was TMN related to The WELL? The documented kinship is in the software, not in the institutions: Caucus and the WELL’s PicoSpan are both descendants of CONFER (see The WELL), which makes the two networks cousins once removed — same ancestor, different houses. Documented contact exists one level up: TMN stood in the Electronic Networking Association’s founding consortium in 1985, and the ENA was founded by an MDG partner. No source consulted places The WELL inside that consortium, and none shows the two networks dealing with each other directly. What remains is convergence: two communities working out the same answers — conferences, hosts, real names, item-shaped talk — from the same 1970s inheritance. The editor’s own question stands as the honest summary: coincidence, “like chimps coming up with food washing concurrently on different islands?” Cousins by software, strangers by institution, twins by convergence.
consulted sources
Wikipedia, “Frank L. Burns” — the founder; Task Force Delta; the Electronic Networking Association
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (rev. ed. 2000) — Burns and MDG in the conferencing world
Odd de Presno, The Online World — the Arlington address and telnet tmn.com, in period listings
Business Wire (July 23, 1997) and trade press (September 1997) — Kodak’s acquisition of Picture Network International; SRA’s search-engine patents
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