Daniel Singer Bricklin is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix, which he left in 2004. He currently serves as the chief technology officer of Alpha Software.
James Parry, commonly known by his nickname and username Kibo, is a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long signature, and a machine-assisted knack for "kibozing": joining any thread in which "kibo" was mentioned. His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion "Kibology", centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
A signature block is a personalized block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an email message, Usenet article, or forum post.
VisiCalc is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp on October 17, 1979. It is considered the killer application for the Apple II, turning the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, and then prompting IBM to introduce the IBM PC two years later. More than 700,000 copies were sold in six years, and up to 1 million copies over its history.
The Internet Oracle is an effort at collective humor in a pseudo-Socratic question-and-answer format.
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, i.e. repeated posting of a message or very similar messages to newsgroups. The spam may be commercial advertisements, opinionated messages, malicious files, or nonsensical posts designed to disrupt the newsgroups. A type of newsgroup spam is sporgery which is intended to make the targeted newsgroups unreadable. The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess", and attempts to purge newsgroups of spam.
Joel K. "Jay" Furr is an American writer and software trainer, notable as a Usenet personality in the early and mid-1990s.
VisiCorp was an early personal computer software publisher. Its most famous products were Microchess, Visi On and VisiCalc.
James Davis Nicoll is a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, former security guard and role-playing game store owner, and five-time Hugo nominee, who also works as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents, which he has narrated over the years in Usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom. He is now a blogger on Dreamwidth and Facebook, and an occasional columnist on Tor.com. In 2014, he started his website, jamesdavisnicoll.com, dedicated to his book reviews of works old and new; and later added Young People Read Old SFF, where his panel of younger readers read pre-1980 science fiction and fantasy, and Nicoll and his collaborators report on the younger readers' reactions.
SoftQuad Software, Ltd., was a Canadian software company best known for HoTMetaL, the first commercial HTML editor. It is also known for Author/Editor, the first specialized SGML editor, and Panorama, the first browser plugin for SGML. Panorama demonstrated the need for standardization of SGML on the web, which eventually resulted in the development of the XML specification.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
Atari, Inc. is an American video gaming company based in New York City, and a subsidiary of the Atari SA holding company. It is the main entity serving the commercial Atari brand globally since 2003. The company currently publishes games based on retro Atari franchises as well as some new content, and also produces the new Atari 2600+ console. In the past it produced titles including Neverwinter Nights, Driver 3, Fahrenheit, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Test Drive Unlimited.
Mary Robinette Kowal is an American author, translator, art director, and puppeteer. She has worked on puppetry for shows including Jim Henson Productions and the children's show LazyTown. As an author, she is a four-time Hugo Award winner, and served as the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 2019-2021.
While the term "blog" was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between messages on a metaphorical "corkboard". Some have likened blogging to the Mass-Observation project of the mid-20th century.
ROFLCon was a biennial convention of internet memes that took place in 2008, 2010 and 2012, featuring various internet celebrities. All three events were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ROFLCon was first organized by a group of students from Harvard University led by Tim Hwang. According to Hwang, the inspiration for the conference was the September 23, 2007 meetup of fans of xkcd with its creator, Randall Munroe, in a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
ClariNet Communications Corp was an online newspaper service delivered over the internet. It was founded in 1989 in Waterloo, Ontario by Brad Templeton.
Aliette de Bodard is a French-American speculative fiction writer.
The KDE Gear is a set of applications and supporting libraries that are developed by the KDE community, primarily used on Linux-based operating systems but mostly multiplatform, and released on a common release schedule.
Meg Elison is an American author and feminist essayist whose writings often incorporate the themes of female empowerment, body positivity, and gender flexibility. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award, and her second novel, The Book of Etta, was nominated for the award in 2017. Elison's work has appeared in several markets, including Fantasy & Science Fiction, Terraform, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Catapult, and Electric Literature.
