MindVox was an early Internet service provider in New York City. The service was referred to as "the Hells Angels of Cyberspace". The service was founded in 1991 by Bruce Fancher (Dead Lord) and Patrick Kroupa (Lord Digital), two former members of the Legion of Doom hacker group. It was initially launched in March 1992 as an invite-only offering, and eventually made generally available to the public in November that same year. MindVox was the second Internet Service Provider in New York City, and the first test message posted to Usenet via the service was created by the infamous hacker Phiber Optik, in 1992, while waiting for a Manhattan grand jury indictment for hacking activities. At this time, customers of the only other service provider had already posted nearly 6,000 messages. MindVox’s domain phantom.com was registered on 14 February 1992.
Founding and early years
The distinctive logo shown to the left was the system's original ASCII art banner, appearing on the text-only service's dial-up login page. MindVox was originally accessible only through telnet, FTP and direct dial-up. Its existence predates the invention of SSH and widespread use of the World Wide Web by several years. In later years, MindVox was also accessible via the web. The parent company, Phantom Access Technologies, Inc., took its name from a hacking program written by Kroupa during his early teens, called Phantom Access. MindVox functioned both as a private BBS service, containing its own dedicated discussion groups, termed "conferences" — though usually referred to as "forums" by users — as well as a provider of internet and Usenet access. By 1994 the subscriber base was at around 3,000. In many ways MindVox was a harder, edgier, New York incarnation of the WELL, a famous Northern Californian online community. While users were drawn from all over the world, the majority lived in the New York City area, and members who met through the conferences often became acquainted in person, either on their own, or through meetups that were termed "VoxMeats" (a formal gathering of members, whose double entendre name was rumored to be well-earned). Prominent MindVox "evangelists" included sci-fi author Charles Platt, who wrote about MindVox for Wired Magazine and featured it within his book Anarchy Online. MindVox also attracted (sometimes with the aid of free accounts) artists, writers and activists, including Billy Idol, Wil Wheaton, Robert Altman, Douglas Rushkoff, John Perry Barlow, and Kurt Cobain. The level of hysteria and hype surrounding MindVox was so great that in 1993 executives at MTV who were using the system wanted to buy it outright and turn MindVox into a subsidiary of Viacom.
"Voices in My Head" MindVox was deeply connected to the emerging non-academic hacker culture and ideas about the potentials of cyberspace, as can be seen in Patrick Kroupa's essay, Voices in my Head, MindVox: The Overture, which announced the upcoming opening of MindVox, and crossed the line into shaping an entire culture's mythology, seeing publication in magazines such as Wired, and extensive coverage throughout the media. Voices provided a compelling and sweeping first-person overview of the cultural forces that were at play in the hacker underground during the decade that pre-dated MindVox, considered by some the "Golden Age" of cyberspace. More than a decade later, Voices remains one of the most read and widely distributed pieces of writing to ever emerge about the origins and possible futures of cyberspace. It was the spark that propelled Kroupa out of obscurity and into the pages of books, describing him as the Jim Morrison of cyberspace. Voices also helped turn MindVox from being just another ISP into a counter-cultural media darling meriting full-length features in magazines and newspapers such as Rolling Stone, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New Yorker.
"Voice: Waffle ][+ the NeXTSTEP" As with many things MindVox-related, the name of the software MindVox ran on, was both a play on words and an elaborate inside-joke. Voice: Waffle ][+ the NeXTSTEP (usually referred to simply as Voice, although it frequently was referred to by the plural Voices as well), was the name given to MindVox's conferencing system. Waffle refers to the original software that MindVox was based on, the ][+ pays homage to Kroupa and Fancher's hacker past and the use of Apple II computers; NeXTSTEP was a reference to the NeXT platform and operating system, with which MindVox was developed and launched.
As much as Patrick Kroupa's Voices focused the media and counter-culture spotlight on MindVox; Fancher's software was a source of tremendous attention in many MindVox-related stories and it's unlikely that MindVox would have enjoyed its success without Voice. At the time MindVox launched, it was one of the first public-access ISPs in the world. The major technical difference between MindVox and every other system at the time, was instead of expecting newcomers to understand Unix and meet a cryptic shell prompt, the entire system was accessible through Fancher's highly flexible interface. The original Waffle software was written by Tom Dell, who was apparently part of MindVox from its inception. There were also Easter-eggs and cross-references on both MindVox and the system that Tom Dell became better known for in the late 1990s and beyond: Rotten.com. Going to Rotten's search page, and triple-clicking on the whitespace located between the Contact section and the gray bar at the bottom, revealed an inscrutable ibogaine rant. By the mid-1990s the original Waffle software was nearly unrecognizable; Fancher had converted Voice to a client-server architecture, included a web interface, and added elaborate "power user" features which seem to have been added to address the evolving needs of the community; or due to a strange combination of drugs, nostalgia and pure whim. An example of the latter case is VoxChat, a proprietary chat system written for MindVox by employee David Schenfeld, which spun off into the commercial product ENTchat after MindVox shut down. Diversi-Dial, and the Diversi-Dial spinoff ENTchat, allowed MindVox to connect via the Diversi-Dial chat protocol.), or in Kroupa's own words:
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